No. Topics is oriented at targeting ads to people with specific interests.
This technology is designed to measure "conversion", e.g., when people click on an ad and then buy the corresponding product in a privacy-preserving way.
They have similar objectives but achieve them differently. Roughly, Private Click Measurement uses very low entropy identifiers to achieve rough of clicks and conversions. IPA uses multiparty computation instead. Probably the most salient differences are:
PCM leaks some information about user behavior, but it has a high degree of uncertainty due to the structure of the reporting. So, you might be able to say that there is an X% chance someone saw this ad. IPA is intended only to reveal aggregate information. The price of this is (1) computational complexity and (2) that you have to have some level of trust in the aggregators (e.g., you trust that they don't collude).
PCM doesn't work in cases where the click and the conversion (purchase) happen on different devices (e.g., a phone and a laptop). IPA potentially does.
The slides imply cross device/browser identification? I can't see how that happens without some kind of shared account mechanism.
The slides imply that losing cross device attribution is a regression. It absolutely is not, as such ability does not currently exist. So this
While I recognize the advertisers may want attribution, but it still seems like FB+Google both still want to know as much about the user as possible, and both definitely have the resources to achieve the de-anonymising attacks (especially given chrome's ever present attempts to get people to tie their entire browsing session to their google identity).
You're right that this assumes an account. The way that cross device/browser identification works in IPA is that if you are logged into example.com (though realistically, often Facebook) then it can set a "match key" which is the same on device and browser. You can't read the match key, only write it. This match key is used to link up activities on both. The point of the crypto is to rerandomize the match key that appears in the reports so that it is possible two see that two actions are from the same device but not link that back up to the original match key. Note that in this proposal, the assumption is that anyone would be able to use anyone else's match key (addressed by origin) so that it's not a big advantage to be the site with the account.
Re whether this is a regression or not: I am not an expert on how the current attribution mechanism works but I believe that if people are logged into (for instance) Facebook then Facebook can use that to correlate clicks on device A with purchases on device B.
they were the first to do it natively and properly. but my excitement didn't last. i was having a hard time with their bazillion settings. i wanted something that works well out of the box. i know some people like all these possible options but it was not for me.
nowadays, i use edge for vertical tabs.
edge is chrome with vertical tabs in my world. but it would be cool if the minimized sidebar didn't expand on hover. it's a user experience nightmare. (in case any engineer on the edge project is reading)
i agree the settings were a bit overwhelming at first - but I eventually settled on something rather minimalistic and haven't changed anything since YMMV of course, and I just refuse to use Edge out of principle.
Oh. Bigger story here appears to be that the proposal is publicly editable and has already been vandalized. I'm not going to link to it, but I will say that I'm not thrilled that Mozilla is handling proposals using these formats/hosting choices.
So much of this feels weird to me.
I don't understand how I'm supposed to take Mozilla partnering with Facebook, I don't understand why I'm supposed to believe that Facebook would ever have beneficial insight to add to a privacy standard or that it would ever do anything other than try to weaken the standard.
I can't read up on the IPA standard because the link is currently being vandalized, so I can't really comment on that, but this is dangerous ground to tread and also I vaguely feel like as a user I might want to not have ads attributed across devices.
Before anybody jumps in and yells about how Mozilla is worse than Google, let me point out that Firefox is still objectively the best browser to use for privacy right now. But crud this announcement is weird and vaguely tone-deaf and doesn't make me feel good, and I think at the very least it should have been worded less as a celebration, or at least should have spent more time going into why I shouldn't feel uncomfortable about the whole thing.
It's potentially a longer conversation, but the article also doesn't really make a strong case for why I should be rooting for a privacy-respecting system for advertisers in the first place.
> I don't understand why I'm supposed to believe that Facebook would ever have beneficial insight to add to a privacy standard or that it would ever do anything other than try to weaken the standard.
I don’t think that’s why you want FB/Meta here. But you want to make sure this is useful enough for the ad companies so this actually becomes a solution. If you build a super private solution no advertising company wants/can use, then you’re just wasting time.
Assuming the competition is standard built by Google within itself, this makes sense.
(Meta employee, don’t work on ads, opinions my own)
> If you build a super private solution no advertising company wants/can use, then you’re just waiting time.
Which is why regulation is needed. Otherwise, any solution needs to be more attractive to the advertisers than the people they stalk (i.e. everybody else).
Is it me or these days major tech non profits feels marginally less of an advocate of privacy related matters compared EU as a whole? TBH I think GNU failed to make any sort of progress in terms of privacy because their ideology was always on the extremist side. And all the rest of the NGO's kept compromising to meet demands of big tech. Then you have the EU, who will just slap fines without compromising at all.
Moreover lobbying runs US govt. Tech non profits are financed largely by megacorps so they won't necessarily bite the hand that feed them.
We can just outlaw certain types of tracking, your employer does not need to be given a seat at the table, nor does it deserve one.
Meta will happily use any data they can access about people, and this will just be an additional data point that augments the extensive behavioral profiles they have on most internet users.
This is yet another attempt to not accept no for an answer when it comes to data collection, because not getting any data on users who refused data collection is unfathomable to them.
> But you want to make sure this is useful enough for the ad companies so this actually becomes a solution.
I guess the question though is: is Facebook going to stop delivering ads if the solution isn't good enough? Why is it important that Facebook like the system?
Facebook was very upset about Apple's privacy changes, it didn't get rid of ads on iOS. It's been very upset about a lot of things. What throws me in these conversations is that I'm not sure why the solution has to be one that Facebook is happy with. What Facebook would be happy with is as much data as they're allowed to have. And also, Facebook doesn't really have veto powers over what anyone else does, so it's not like we need to find a middle ground with the company.
Part of the problem of building a solution that's good enough that advertisers won't want more is that it's difficult to believe that solution exists. Facebook is pretty clear that the constraints on what they'll collect is defined in their internal/public privacy policies, and within that constraint they will collect as much data as the platform offers.
I'm not aware of any instances of a platform offering an ad attribution system that was privacy preserving, and having Facebook (or other companies) decide not to do any fingerprinting or insert any tracking links into pages, or use any cookies on that platform. I also find it really hard to believe that if Mozilla cracks down on fingerprinting and doesn't provide an alternative that Facebook is happy with, that Facebook will stop selling ads.
Yea, there seems to be an unwarranted assumption that Facebook is somehow a necessary part of the ecosystem. They aren't. The internet will continue without them and doesn't need them.
The billboards are all virtual. If your interface doesn't render them they don't exist, and without colluding with advertiser's the size and rate of ads to a system that blocks ads is a meaningless number because they are never rendered.
The real question is why is my supposedly privacy preserving interface colluding with this advertiser at all? I do not want them involved in my interface and it seems contrary to Mozilla's userbase's interests.
Google at least went to the trouble of building a new browser and taking over the market. Facebook hasn't done anything to be involved except have money to pay off a seemingly corrupt mozzila
I don't expect advertisers to stop putting up billboards and I don't expect them to blow down. I live in a part of the world where billboards are banned. Likewise, all advertisements are banned from my network and any devices I manage.
We are under no obligation to negotiate. Destroying the whole industry is on the table.
Yes but Firefox is NOT in any position to do that. The only ones are Apple via iOS Google through Chrome, and the Government and none do these entities have any incentive to do so. As such this is the most plausible way forward.
I'm not certain if Apple and Google acting bilaterally could actually kill advertising dead - I think, even with the enormous power they have, that we'd still need the government to come in as a rule setter to accomplish it. I think there's too much money on the table for both parties to stay honest in the long run for purely altruistic reasons.
> Expecting advertisers to stop advertising on the Internet is like expecting all the billboards on the highway to blow down.
That's not the expectation at all, in fact quite the opposite.
Giving concessions to advertisers doesn't make anything change. Anti-fingerprinting is the way you stop advertisers from fingerprinting. Nothing else short of legislation will work, and even legislation doesn't always work in every scenario.
Expecting advertisers to behave just because you gave them a more private attribution system is like expecting ants to stop going onto your countertops just because you put a cupcake on the floor.
The question is, given that Facebook will always take as much data as they are able to technically extract from the browser, and given that you're correct and advertisers are not going to stop advertising on the Internet regardless of what restrictions are put up -- why is it important to make them happy or to give the company concessions? Building a system that Facebook is happy with won't make its behavior change, so why do we care if they like the things we build?
> do we want an ever-escalating arms race or a negotiated peace?
I have yet to see an evidence that a negotiated peace is possible, and I have seen a lot of evidence that suggests to me that it is impossible.
I personally would rather see hard anti-fingerprinting features in browsers, potentially combined with legislation to fill in the gaps. I have seen a lot of evidence from platforms like iOS, and from web standards like deprecating cookies, that advertisers are only willing to come to the table after they've already lost, and that they only come to the table to weaken existing standards.
I have a lot of criticism of Apple, but I look at some of the changes in iOS that were made in regards to Facebook, and it's hard for me not to conclude that the best ways to tangibly improve privacy on platforms like Facebook are to just move forward without its permission. I look at adblockers the same way, there were no conversations about acceptable ads until advertisers thought it was possible that adblockers might become widespread.
It's not clear to me what a negotiated peace would entail or how to get there, but it is very clear to me how to improve anti-fingerprinting measures and how to pass legislation. Yes, that means that we're in an arms race, but if we understand that advertisers are always going to advocate for more tracking, it follows that a theoretical negotiated peace would also need to be constantly renegotiated over and over again.
Short of burning the industry to the ground and not having ads online, which I think is a separate conversation, I don't believe there is a stable solution to advertising and privacy. Whether it's legislation or technology or industry standards, they will always need to be defended and reinforced and renegotiated. There will always be advertisers arguing that they should be more lax. And I think that's part of why the idea of an arms race isn't that scary to me, because to me all of it is an arms race, including negotiated acceptable ad standards.
> More generally, though, I have to ask: do we want an ever-escalating arms race or a negotiated peace?
That's not a choice that's being offered. There is no reason to expect advertising platforms like Google or Facebook to ever be happy with "enough tracking". If they can get more information, they will want more, regardless of any "negotiations". This has been shown pretty clearly with the DoNotTrack header (now itself a tracking element), and the GDPR cookie policies.
> Legislation definitely needs to be part of the solution.
Yup, that's about where I'm at. Standard Oil wasn't broken up because a lot of people made extremely rational arguments about how much monopolies hurt long term economic health to Rockefeller and he just changed his mind. It was broken up because the government stepped in.
Advertising is costing America an intense amount of productivity and we're going to need regulations and constraints to help restrict it (vermont has greatly benefited from said billboard restrictions)
It is devaluing our services causing them to be less competitive and decreasing worker productivity by lowering the enjoyment of leisure activities leading to higher stress and increasing tool friction. If you want numbers - I don't have them... but the effects on our mental health are pretty clear.
Funny enough, that cupcake trick works for bees (old Boy Scout trick: if you're having bee trouble, put some juice in a can and set it away from the campsite. Bees will gravitate towards the easier target).
But on the topic: at least in the US, if we're talking a legal solution, there won't be one that doesn't factor in the needs of Fortune 500 companies. And attempts to build solutions not factoring them in in Europe got us, well, the GDPR and infinite consent dialogs.
Better to bring parties to the table than try to hash a solution that pretends they don't have interests here.
GDPR works rather well, if given enough teeth. At the very least, nobody in the EU and the UK is quite so reckless with personal data as they used to be, which is the point. The infinite consent dialogs... I'd argue they were an oversight during the drafting process, and that nobody expected companies to go full-idiot just to keep processing and collecting data, rather than just comply with the law in the simplest possible way - which is to just stop collecting guest visitor data.
> nobody expected companies to go full-idiot just to keep processing and collecting data, rather than just comply with the law in the simplest possible way
But there was over a decade of frameworks built on the old "collect everything and use it later" model. By default, even Apache collects enough information to be considered a GDPR violation.
Throwing a dialog up and putting one cookie on the end-user's machine was the simplest possible way; the alternative was a mass audit of all dependencies.
(... and if anyone drafting the law didn't realize this, it would strongly indicate they didn't pull enough industry people into the process to draft a good law).
Advertisers, like all entities, are as free to do what they like as we allow them to be. They don't have to be a part of the conversation, we don't have to care about advertisers.
Cutting them out makes it more likely that the resulting law won't actually work IMO.
Nobody understands the ad industry better than advertisers. Incentivize them to compromise and we're more likely to get something that actually works than incentivizing them to get creative in finding legal loopholes.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say the comparison suggests an extremist position that should have no business dictating the law on the topic (still a position worth hearing while seeking compromise, of course).
They aren't murderers, but they sure are bullies [0], time wasters, attention thieves and they try to manipulate you into changing your mind about your choices.
Maybe the ideal is that it's none of those things, that advertising in theory should be about matching consumers with the product they'd like best - but the fact is that in the age of the Internet, it's been nothing but unwelcome manipulation, and everyone puts up with it because it's the only funding model that's "free" at the point of use.
What's your view on how this proposal compares to Apple's PCM? Why is Apple building a similar way for 3rd parties to reliably track users if this is overall harmful for users?
> What Facebook would be happy with is as much data as they're allowed to have.
Indeed. However, platform owners like Apple and Google are currently in a privileged position, where they make rules for others to follow but are free to collect any and all data they want.
> While we believe that Apple’s move to eliminate IDFA was done in the spirit of advancing consumer privacy, it may ultimately provide Apple with an advertising platform that is competitively advantaged vs. peers who don’t have access to Apple’s richer APIs
> What's your view on how this proposal compares to Apple's PCM? Why is Apple building a similar way for 3rd parties to reliably track users if this is overall harmful for users?
It's always tricky to talk about Apple's positions on privacy. In some areas they are very good, but in some areas they are very good at appearing to be very good. I think that Apple itself wants to be able to do some level of attribution on the web. I think that Apple is under a lot more stress from regulators than Mozilla is. Obviously Apple has an inherent interest in making it look like that's not the case and that they're just solely on the side of privacy.
I also think your concern about Apple/Google privileging their own platforms is completely accurate. However, I don't think that the solution to that is to make privacy worse in other areas, I would rather see Apple/Google hold themselves to the same standards that they hold other companies.
In short, I'm not angry at Apple for the changes it's making because they hurt Facebook, I'm angry at Apple for either ignoring those changes itself or making sure that those changes don't apply to parts of iOS and the web that are important to Apple. This has come up a couple of times with iOS; it's good that 3rd-party apps have more restrictions on tracking, I wish the built-in apps were the same.
I assume they would be happy if this became a standard that Apple buys into, but the real competition is Google's proposal. And if that doesn't work out, the status quo continuing with tracking via third-party cookies.
Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines, regardless of how strongly you feel about $topic? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
We've already asked you repeatedly not to post flamewar comments on HN. Not cool.
> If you build a super private solution no advertising company wants/can use, then you’re just wasting time.
Not really. I don't want any advertising company to use any information about me under any circumstances. Working towards that goal is not wasting my time.
Your point of view is diplomatic, but it rests on the assumption that you actually need cooperation from adtech in order to make a solution.
As Apple has proven, this is simply not true: you just need the entities that control the browser / OS.
This implies that it’s not “collaboration with adtech” that you want, but rather “collaboration with the biggest browser vendors”. Unfortunately the biggest browser is in hands of Google.
Thus Google has a huge influence in this. But any other adtech company (including FB/meta) has no meaningful contribution.
FWIW, you can choose to "View final document" which gets rid of all the proposed vandalism. Still really bad that the default view contains all the proposals.
I understand why people use Google Docs, it's a very convenient platform.
But this is a technical document about browser features, I'm a little frustrated that this is being coordinated over a proprietary SaaS service instead of over Git[0] with markdown or something.
I think a lot more than that, I'm frustrated that the document is being made publicly available on that platform. When someone links to a web standard on Github, often it's because the standard is seeing active participation. For something that is being linked to a public view, I would have loved to see at least a PDF export or something.
It's not that it's completely inexcusable, I'm sure Mozilla is making use of Google Doc features, markups, contribution history, whatever. It is just disappointing to see that apparently there isn't an Open collaboration platform that Mozilla thinks is good enough for this process, even a self-hosted one.
It's not the biggest deal in the world, it just feels like a bad look to see Mozilla tout that it's built this great standard, and then click on the link and get sent to a Google Doc. I mean... this article is about privacy, if I'm currently signed into Google and I click on this link, does it mean anything that Google now knows I personally clicked on it? I know it's not the end of the world, but Mozilla literally just finished telling me how good it was at anonymizing data, and now it's leaking my reading habits to Google in an extremely targeted, de-anonymized form.
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[0]: Yes, I know that many standards processes on the web use Github, which is also a proprietary SaaS, but at least the majority of that process (issue tracker aside) is usable just as an endpoint.
> It is just disappointing to see that apparently there isn't an Open collaboration platform that Mozilla thinks is good enough for this process, even a self-hosted one.
Mozilla has been hosting an EtherPad instance for some time now, which may have worked in place of Google Docs for this.
Blegh... it's disappointing to see this on the linked blogpost, but it's a lot more disappointing to see it for wikis directly relevant to a Github repo.
Again, I know that Github is also SaaS, but there's a difference. That kind of stuff should be handled differently.
>But this is a technical document about browser features, I'm a little frustrated that this is being coordinated over a proprietary SaaS service instead of over Git[0] with markdown or something.
Then maybe the public SaaS services should be of a better quality so that Mozilla employees want to use them.
>I think a lot more than that, I'm frustrated that the document is being made publicly available on that platform. When someone links to a web standard on Github, often it's because the standard is seeing active participation. For something that is being linked to a public view, I would have loved to see at least a PDF export or something.
There is a PDF export for google docs which is available to all users. File > Download > PDF.
> Then maybe the public SaaS services should be of a better quality so that Mozilla employees want to use them.
Maybe a company that has been throwing money into dozens of random privacy initiatives outside of the browser market (some good and some bad) would be a good fit for solving that problem? Dogfooding software is a really good strategy for UX design after all.
> There is a PDF export for google docs which is available to all users. File > Download > PDF.
That's exactly what I mean. Someone wrote this blog post, could they have hit the PDF export button and then linked to that PDF hosted on Mozilla's servers? That would have prevented the vandalism problem they ran into.
The issue I have isn't that I can't export to PDF from Google Docs. The issue that I have is that I have to visit Google Docs and load a ton of proprietary Javascript just so I can hit a PDF export button. Google Docs has an API, Mozilla could have a script that's just auto-exporting a PDF and hosting it on a public endpoint on a regular interval.
> I don't understand how I'm supposed to take Mozilla partnering with Facebook, I don't understand why I'm supposed to believe that Facebook would ever have beneficial insight to add to a privacy standard or that it would ever do anything other than try to weaken the standard.
You should take it the exact same way as when:
- Mozilla put proprietary, closed-source DRM (widevine) into their product
- Mozilla put nonconsensual (opt-out) telemetry (aka spyware) into their product
- Mozilla put Google backend services into their product
- Mozilla put advertising/paid placement into their product
The "Mozilla is about privacy and open standards" meme is a false one and has been for a long time. Actions speak a lot louder than words.
I did raise a stink over closed-source DRM, I raised a stink not just over Firefox adding it, I raised a stink over the entire web standards process. I have raised stinks about telemetry and advertising within Firefox. I've raised stinks about Pocket being purchased and not Open Sourced, and then integrated into the browser by default. I've raised stink about a lot of things.
Nevertheless, it is still objectively true that Mozilla Firefox is the best mainstream browser right now for privacy, and anyone who argues otherwise is either not looking at the bigger picture or hasn't done much research into how companies do the majority of their tracking online. The privacy problems that Mozilla has had have objectively less impact on people's everyday privacy than Chromium's hobbled extension support. The ability to turn on anti-fingerprinting features uplifted from Tor is more important than whether or not Google search is enabled by default. Container-extensions are more practically impactful on everyday privacy than Pocket is.
I am literally complaining about and criticizing Mozilla right now, and yet the immediate reaction is to jump on the one positive thing I said and act like I'm somehow ignoring Mozilla's other issues. I'm not ignoring those issues, but the "Mozilla is corrupt and no better than Google" meme is similarly completely ridiculous. Every single other browser on the market including DeGoogled Chromium and Safari are hobbled in ways that make them worse for privacy, and overall Mozilla still as a company has a better track record on fighting for privacy and building privacy-preserving tools than Google/Microsoft/Brave -- at least it has a better track record in the ways that matter.
It is so frustrating to try and have a constructive conversation about real missteps that Mozilla is making when people view anything less than a complete condemnation of the company like that means they're being put on a pedestal. Mozilla isn't perfect, and it's clumsy and sometimes does outright bad stuff, and that is still consistent with them being one of the better corporate privacy advocates on the Internet.
> It is so frustrating to try and have a constructive conversation about real missteps that Mozilla is making when people view anything less than a complete condemnation of the company like it's holding them on a pedestal.
Check the title. It is absolutely on topic. Mozilla is doing this to themselves, each and every one of those is an unforced error. If your mission really is a free and open as well as privacy respecting web you don't invite the largest privacy violator on the planet to the table to have a say. Just like you don't invite serial killers and druglords to your panel on how to combat crime.
> If your mission really is a free and open as well as privacy respecting web you don't invite the largest privacy violator on the planet to the table to have a say.
If you're trying to insinuate that working with Google or Facebook on this issue means that Mozilla fundamentally doesn't care about privacy, that is a ridiculous, fantastical claim that requires closing your eyes to years of work from the company.
I am right here criticizing Mozilla for partnering with Facebook, they should not be doing that. It's irresponsible and harmful. Nevertheless, Firefox is objectively the most private consumer-grade browser on the market, including Brave and DeGoogled Chromium. Nevertheless, Mozilla has done more to push web privacy forward than the majority of people on this site myself included, and more to push web privacy forward than the entirety of the rest of the browser market.
Even if you are on topic, there's nothing constructive about jumping onto every Mozilla thread arguing that Mozilla is the same as Google when they're very clearly not. It's unproductive because I shouldn't even need to be wasting my time defending a company that I came here to criticize. It makes it harder to fix real problems when all of them are equated and treated as being identically severe, and when the conclusion everyone draws from every problem is "use something based on Chrome and give up on the entire effort".
A Mozilla that fundamentally cared about privacy would have made none of these decisions. I've grown increasingly cynical over the last couple of years that this is just another marketing ploy, it sounds good and keeps us in but you have to wonder whether it is really true given their decisions to date.
The 'years of work from the company' are fantastic, but should not give them a pass in the present, given that the last couple of years most of that goodwill has been burned.
Additionally, it seems like it would be practically zero up front cost for Mozilla to provide a no-telemetry, no-google, no-pocket, no-ads, no-sync, no-experiments, no-privacy-compromise alternative build as a one-click option for people who actually want a privacy-focused browser. Instead, we have to download the normal "product-manager-ized" one and turn off a bunch of intrusive stuff we never really wanted in a browser.
They don't do this, though. I speculate (without any direct knowledge of the situation) that this is because they believe that the majority of their users would opt for this build instead, and they would lose "insights" (and of course revenue).
Someone, somewhere, is prioritizing "line go up and to the right" over embodying the fundamental ethos of a privacy-focused company. If you ship private software, there is of course no line.
It is interesting though how long people will continue to assume the best, in a way it is endearing, and it worked for for instance Google for more than a decade. There are still people who believe they are acting in our best interest even today.
I don't know how you can possibly read either my comments or the general tone of the other people responding to me as giving Mozilla a pass on this, or naively assuming the best about them.
Even with that criticism, it is still just plain silly to say that Mozilla even in its modern state is not meaningfully different from Google/Facebook/etc. You can be as cynical as you want to be, but if you can't tell the difference between Chrome/Chromium and Firefox today, then that's not cynicism, it's either a lack of realism or a lack of attention.
I've gone into a few of the tangible differences elsewhere, but even in recent years and even with recent missteps, it's still pretty obvious that Mozilla is better on privacy and user rights than Google is. And it's OK to want better than Mozilla. It's OK to want a company that takes more hard-line stances and that pushes harder on its core browser. Lots of people want that, myself included. Doesn't change anything about what I've said above though.
> it's still pretty obvious that Mozilla is better on privacy and user rights than Google is.
'better than Google', after Facebook the #2 privacy violator on the plant isn't much of a bar.
> And it's OK to want better than Mozilla. It's OK to want a company that takes more hard-line stances and that pushes harder on its core browser.
Mozilla claims to be that company, and that is why I have a problem with all these issues. Once upon a time they were the gold standard, that's no longer true today.
> 'better than Google', after Facebook the #2 privacy violator on the plant isn't much of a bar.
And it is the only bar to clear. Here's the list of browser makers we have right now:
- Google
- Microsoft
- Apple
- Brave
- Some people off someplace trying desperately to make Gecko secure.
- Some people off someplace trying desperately to make V8/Electron/Chromium competitive on privacy.
- Some proprietary stuff like Vivaldi that's also based on Chromium.
- Mozilla
Mozilla wins that fight. They are still the gold standard by virtue of nobody else being able to make a competitively private browser.
> Mozilla claims to be that company
Even with its faults, Mozilla is still completely accurate in claiming that they push meaningfully harder for both privacy and user agency on the web than other browser manufacturers. Now, as you say, that may be a low bar to clear. But given that no one else is even trying to clear the bar, that is still a meaningful difference between Mozilla and its competition.
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I think the biggest issue I have with these kinds of debates is that there's never anything constructive or new being offered, it's not even pointing out a new criticism. I know about Mozilla's failings as a company, you're not illuminating anything for me on that front, I know about all of their controversies. So you've identified that Mozilla could be better, great. Now what?
There's value in pointing out problems when it actually draws attention to an issue, but everybody on this thread knows what the issues are with Mozilla. And it is still obvious that Mozilla is noticeably better on these issues than the rest of the browser market, and that Mozilla is still doing quite a lot of good in that space. You're commenting on a thread of people who are pointing out Mozilla's flaws and telling it to do better -- and you're putting those people down and calling them naive.
Well, if pointing out Mozilla's flaws and telling them to be better is a waste of time, what would you propose instead? Moving over to Chrome? Pretending that indie Gekko projects have the resources to be private or secure? Giving up on the entire thing and not using the web anymore? I mean, drop a donation link to Servo, do something other than snubbing people for caring about trying to make the web better. You have exactly one available group of allies in this fight, and your response to that is to call them naive and say they're not good enough.
You're talking to someone who likely agrees with you on the vast majority of your privacy stances, and who is actively criticizing Mozilla right now, but that's not enough unless it's paired with despair and a complete dismissal of the company? Don't you see how that's unhelpful? And it's not even accurate: Mozilla may have "fallen", but they are still overall doing more good than harm in this area and they are still producing the best browser for privacy on the market. There's a huge lack of perspective in the doom-and-gloom takes, they're just as narrow and selective as the the view that Mozilla can do nothing wrong -- it's acting like all of the recent work on ETP and supercookies just doesn't exist or something, it's as if DoS or multi-account containers were never made. The Tor Uplift project only started in 2016 and only went live in mainline Firefox in 2019, but sure, Mozilla isn't doing anything for privacy now.
It's simple: absolute vs relative. For you Mozilla is in a relative sense the best because they take the foremost stance about privacy. For me being 'privacy first' is an absolute thing: it precludes you from doing a whole raft of things that Mozilla has done. So for me they lost the title, that doesn't mean they aren't still the best.
This is a great question, and it gets to the heart of practical privacy online.
DeGoogled Chromium does actually have less telemetry problems than Firefox, so it's really easy for DeGoogled Chromium proponents to say that it's the most private. The issue is that DeGoogled Chromium is Chromium, and Chromium is a less privacy-capable browser engine than Firefox.
That could be a longer conversation, but the short versions:
- Chromium lacks a number of privacy features that Firefox has, including some anti-fingerprinting options that can be enabled through `about:config`, and container support, which is a really big deal for isolating site data and avoiding correlating user sessions on websites like Github/Youtube/etc... with incidental visits to those sites.
- Chromium's extension API is hobbled, particularly in a couple of areas that Ublock Origin cares about. The wiki goes into more detail on this[0].
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The mistake is in looking at the small amount of (admittedly bad) data-leakage that Firefox does have and being so worried about that information being sent to Google/Cloudflare that you pick a browser that is less good at keeping you private on every other site you visit, including visits to Google/Cloudflare pages.
Thinking practically about this stuff is just a really hard thing to learn to do, at least it is for me. Maybe other people are magically good at it. But I regularly find that it's helpful for me to sit down and think through my privacy goals more tangibly in the form of "how much data is X actually leaking, what should my priorities be based on the volume/nature?" A lot of people worry about privacy problems in the wrong order.
DeGoogled Chromium does have better defaults than Firefox in multiple areas. It's just that the privacy benefits from those changes don't outweigh a crippled Ublock Origin install.
You're probably gonna be downvoted a lot, but I'm afraid you're correct. Mozilla cares about web standards (like HTML or CSS or WebExtensions) - that was their mission after all, it's wrong to say they don't. But their action repeatedly show that don't care about open standards for anything else, like their browser itself.
I'll give another example - look at their Sync system. It's a pseudo-open unholy mess of Mozilla-unique ("proprietary" as in "owned by and unique to a certain company") standards without any regard for interoperabilty and openness. I'm 99% positive it could've been a couple of standard technologies, but they reinvented everything (auth, blob storage, everything) in absolutely unnecessarily unique manner, and awfully overengineered. I've had pleasure of attempting an alternative implementation based on their specs (to self-host, had to abandon because it's all way too hostile), so I know what I'm talking about. It's under a guise of "open standards" (in a sense it happens to be partially documented) but no single engineer in their sane mind would adopt this for their own projects.
Privacy and security? Last time I've checked (admittedly, a couple years ago) it was years since they knew their Firefox Account/Sync auth has security issues and has to trust Mozilla servers to be secure (login form and cryptography suite is not built into browser, like in proper end-to-end encrypted software, but served online), and they didn't do a thing about it, entirely dismissing it as a non-issue. Could've sent that password over HTTPS and just promise to not to save it (actually my alternative now-dead Accounts/Sync implementation did just that as a shortcut). In other words, Mozilla gets a nice gag order (or gets hacked) and they can be forced to circumvent all their end-to-end encryption pull your browsing history just fine without changing a thing on your machine so no local code audit would help. That's not how privacy-conscious software is written (e.g. Signal - it might get backdoored, but it'll need an update to deliver a backdoor).
It doesn't help that there are no alternatives I'm aware of. Firefox sucks but that's - sadly - the best we have.
>Facebook would ever have beneficial insight to add to a privacy standard
I'm not saying "this is it", but here's a (IMO) reasonable line of thought why they would genuinely be working in that direction. Basically, short term pain for long term security. There is a clear preference by consumers for preserving privacy; the percentage of iOS users not allowing targeting since IDFA is proof. There is also political motivation for regulators to crack down on the wild west of online privacy in the US (FB scapegoating) and abroad (GDPR and co). If there is to be a hard turn by regulators and hardware/OS providers for privacy protection and FB does not prepare for it by preparing Audience Network to operate without granular personal data, their whole business model would be at risk and their terminal value threatened. Being prepared for a world placing privacy first protects their financial interests, likely even putting them ahead of competitors that are going in unprepared.
If voting power at FB was majority owned by Wall Street shareholders, you could argue it's unlikely they would hurt operating income for years rather than milk it even if it's protective long term. But that's not the case, Mark does have a super majority and can afford governing for the long term even if it makes analysts critical.
> I don't understand why I'm supposed to believe that Facebook would ever have beneficial insight to add to a privacy standard
Well, the headline says "privacy preserving attribution for advertising". I'm guessing Facebook provides expertise in what kind of attribution advertisers want.
THE story - in fact, the REVELATION - here is that Mozilla thinks it's OK to cooperate with Facebook on PRIVACY work. You can't make this shit up. Not even on hard drugs.
As other commenters have pointed out, it makes sense to work with one of the two largest advertising firms when figuring out how to support their advertising needs, while maintaining user privacy.
If Facebook doesn't use this method, the work towards private attribution that Mozilla is doing doesn't matter.
Furthermore, Mozilla is requesting feedback from everyone, not just Facebook, which helps keep Facebook (and Mozilla) honest in this process.
Google's FLoC was proposed openly as this one is. Everyone and their grandma was up in arms about it. Why give Mozilla a free pass? What is so special about this proposal?
> As other commenters have pointed out, it makes sense to work with one of the two largest advertising firms when figuring out how to support their advertising needs, while maintaining user privacy.
How about not figuring out how to support advertising needs? They can just stick to figuring out privacy.
> What alternative would you propose?
They could focus on user needs. Having an ad-blocker by default would be a good start. Figuring out how to remove advertisers and the incentive to advertise (and thus SEO spam etc.) from the internet is a goal I would support.
I think at the very least championing that partnership is pretty tone-deaf.
The only people who are excited to see Mozilla partner with Facebook are advertisers. I disagree that Mozilla needs Facebook's particular input on this, but ignoring that, even if we say that they do, I'm still somewhat at a loss why they would expect normal readers to be excited about seeing Facebook's name pop up in an article title or why they would think that's something worth bragging about.
It reads like an article written for advertisers, with some fluff (maybe the standard is good, but they're not really going into detail) that basically amounts to "also don't worry, this isn't that bad for you."
I mentioned this further up above, but regardless of whether you like targeted advertising or not, this article still doesn't really make the case why I as a user should be excited about the idea that attribution should work across devices. I don't understand how any of this is good for me as a user outside of the broad idea of "ads pay for things, so you should care if advertisers are happy."
> I don't understand how any of this is good for me as a user outside of the broad idea of "ads pay for things, so you should care if advertisers are happy."
If it works, the improvement for users is that it provides similar monetization for sites (which benefits users in the broad way you described) but without advertisers tracking individuals across sites.
Stop worrying about what companies want and focus on your users. Advertisers are not Firefox users. Firefox users want to block ads, not have sanctioned tracking.
> If Facebook doesn't use this method, the work towards private attribution that Mozilla is doing doesn't matter.
That work already doesn't matter before it begins. There is no solution Facebook will support that actually preserves user privacy, because their core business model is based on broad surveillance.
Any resulting standard will be user hostile and/or useless to advertisers.
This makes the endeavor obviously a waste of resources on Mozilla's part (unless, of course, they plan on selling out their own users to advertisers, in which case it's a great first step).
They've taken Google's money before. Why not siphon off Meta before the company crashes and gets liquidated. /s
Am glad Mozilla's true commercialization intentions are coming full circle. They recently introduced Firefox suggest[0]. Maybe they can finally retire the privacy-first corporate-goobly talk they have been parading for quite some time and join the adtech space as a fresh objectively neutral player.
> Before anybody jumps in and yells about how Mozilla is worse than Google, let me point out that Firefox is still objectively the best browser to use for privacy right now.
So I will be that "anybody". On what do you base your opinion about firefox privacy? Because I reading across the web have got another impression, for example, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9374407
Short version, deficiencies in Chromium and Safari as browser engines are large enough that they outweigh most telemetry concerns. Browsers like Brave can disable some telemetry, sure, but they can't add in the larger set of features that are missing from Chromium. Browser telemetry is worth thinking about and considering, but you should be less concerned about browser telemetry than you are about Ublock Origin performance.
At this point, I cannot see any other explanation than the whole Mozilla Foundation C-suite being compromised and plants by Google. Assuming stupidity only goes so far. A single fuckup is incompetence, ten repeated fuckups is malice. If they wanted to sink Mozilla, they could not do any better.
Perhaps, but a simpler situation is that the C-suite is focusing on their own financials. But either way, it is clear that that Mozilla is no longer the free browser developer we need.
For what it's worth, I've been part of a Mozilla/Facebook partnership (on the Mozilla side) on data compression. Having two tech companies work together (especially when one of them is non-profit) often makes sense.
For this case? I'm sure that there is a good reason. I'm not a Mozilla anymore, so I haven't followed that story, but I imagine that the rationale is something along the lines of "These days, stuff we do in the browser don't have much impact, as web standards have been superseded by Chrome. However, whenever we manage to convince a big company such as Facebook to do even one thing better, we can improve the lives of billions of people."
Targeted advertising cannot simultaneously know everything about a user_id and respect privacy of that user_id. Every bit of privacy is an extra user_id's attribute that could be used for more accurate advertising.
Why do people insist on using this as a point?? It's just guilt by association! Taking Google's money has absolutely nothing to do with privacy. Google paid Mozilla to set them as the default search engine. That in no way decreases the privacy for the user and it gets Mozilla the funding they need to develop privacy-enhancing features that do benefit the user.
Because it is a data point. Sure it isn't a smoking gun pointing to malpractice, but if they are getting $500M/yr from Google, getting into partnerships with Facebook, and continue to make similar moves down the line, you have to question where they can truly be independent enough to be 100% on the consumer's side.
How is that a real data point? Like you said, it just raises questions, it doesn't actually tell you anything. Literally all you're doing is casting vague aspersions.
Besides what the sibling comment said, of course Mozilla can't be independent. Nobody was ever under that illusion. Making a browser takes a shitload of money and Google is a good source of it. Even if that money came with strings attached (it doesn't), that would still be better than the alternative: having only one browser engine.
Being financially independent is great, but only if you survive. I'd take a partially Google-funded independent project that publicly goes against Google's interests all the time over one that Google develops in-house to 100% serve their agenda anytime.
I mean, in 2007 the CEO of Mozilla saw this 'association' as a problem and vowed to not be dependent on Google's money and seek other sources of revenue: [0]
> "Mozilla can live without Google's Money, Baker says"
> "Mozilla Corp. will walk away from Google Inc. and the millions it collects from the search company each year, if that's what it takes to stay independent, the open-source developer's CEO promised"
14 years later, it continues to be on life support by their own anti-privacy competitors since they cannot make any significant revenue sources other than Google's money despite promising to 'walk away' years ago. They know that they can't be 'privacy-first' in their mission statement whilst still taking Google's money. Working with Facebook on this is another way for Mozilla to abandon it's 'privacy-first' selling point which at this point is now meaningless.
1) They did go without Google for a couple of years. They had a partnership with Bing, and Yahoo for quite a while. But Bing and Yahoo remain rounding errors in the search market.
2) 2007 was before Google started dominating with Chrome - before Android even. 2007 was near peak Mozilla. To some degree, fighting Google probably contributed to their decline.
So what would you have them do? We all know they can't survive without Google's money. Things have gotten way worse since that statement (see sibling comment).
They have two choices - work with industry players to find the least privacy-intrusive ways for them to keep doing what they do or give up, accept Google Chrome as the one and only browser and let Google develop constant user tracking as a native browser feature that can't be disabled.
Mozzila does dumb shit all the time and they need to be called out for it. But they are still around, despite their competitor's revenue being over 300x theirs and their market share dropping to below 5%. They still regularly and often successfully oppose Google's attempts at steering web standards to their benefit, despite Google being their main source of funding. Their browser still has the best privacy features out of the box and supports the widest variety of privacy-enhancing extensions.
Like it or not, they are our only hope. A "privacy-first" company means a dead company. Mozilla and every other project (Signal, Telegram, Brave...) is "Survival first, privacy second" and that's still better than the alternative - "profit first, privacy not even a consideration".
Do you really expect anyone who thinks that making 500k/y instead of millions is not a sacrifice they should be asked to make to do anything to risk their primary source of funding?
The money from Google doesn't just buy the default serch engine setting, it is a HUGE incentive for Mozilla to not rock the boat.
Why? Mozilla was one of the last companies giving people what they want, which is a web browser without tracking and without bloat. This to me feels like Mozilla's management has abandoned the values that made me choose them over Chrome.
If Mozilla's browser supports a way for advertisers to track me, be it for attribution, fraud prevention, targeting or any other person, then what is the point in using it over ungoogled-chromium? Mozilla's reputation in my view has sure taken a beating these last few years, and without the details of the proposal (thanks to their own fuckup), it's hard not to assume the worst.
I thought it was the other way around. As it was generally disabled by default, enabling it gave another data point for fingerprinting. But maybe I don't recall correctly.
Either way it works. It's just a feature. What the big issue was was that some browsers would enable it by default and some wouldn't, and then you'd have differences across versions, etc. So it became a more powerful feature.
There was a discussion in PATCG Wednesday about precisely this topic.
Briefly, it should be possible to "disable" this feature by instead encrypting a random match key, which would look the same as having it enabled but merely not be useful for measurement. Obviously, one would need to work through the details of how to make this work in a complete protocol, so this is a little handwavy, but it's definitely a consideration.
I don't see any other way to do DNT without creating an extra facet of identifying information. It's entire point is to convey that information. Contrast with say "allow notifications" which lots of privacy advice says to leave to "ask" otherwise you needlessly add an identifying facet. That preference should be invisible to the sandboxed program, with unwanted notifications just going to /dev/null.
Also DNT is not useless modulo new human rights legislation like the GDPR. I would hope that data protection regulators settle on seeing DNT as an explicit sign of non-consent, and punish websites who try to fraudulently obtain consent with annoying popups etc.
I don't sync anything browser related between my devices, sadly. This isn't as much of an issue with the current travel landscape, but I've a new m1max and the last omicron wave seems to be starting to recede globally, so I'm going to have to find a solution.
I might just manually copy the profile directory to my laptop when I leave, and copy the newer one back to my desktop when I get home. Mutex! TBH I can really only be using one browser at a given time so "sync" seems like overkill as long as I've only two hands and two eyeballs.
As a Firefox user, under what circumstances would that make a difference though? How often do Firefox users get exploited by malware or whatever that Chrome users would be protected from due to improved security? Can you give an example? Genuine questions.
It's changing rapidly. Until recently, Firefox did have a sandbox, but lots of different origins lived together in the same sandbox. Which made it much less useful for many types of attacks. Since Fission (shipping now-ish?), each origin lives in its own sandboxed process—same as Chrome—so on the surface there's no longer any difference.
That said, sandboxes aren't all or nothing, and my impression is that the chromium sandbox is still tighter than Firefox's. (I work for Mozilla, but not on sandboxing, and I'm not in touch with the current state.) That is improving over time, and Firefox already has some types of sandboxing that are ahead of Chrome's.
The main threat model here is malware, probably malware being served to you through an ad network. Run an ad blocker.
Personally, I defend the principle of an ad-funded Web. But not the current practice. As long as ads are in practice an exploit vector, screw 'em.
What does ungoogled-chrome do to prevent advertiser tracking? I think you’re confusing the unbundling of Google services with general tracking on the web, which this proposal aims to replace.
Unless using an ad blocker your browser is not doing anything to actively prevent it, and there is no meaningful difference between chrome / Firefox / edge there.
Clearly not something being done for the benefit of the users. I don't want any of my information (supposedly anonymized or not) from my browser leaking to advertisers if I can help it, and here my browser provider is taking steps to help facilitate this transfer. I'm really losing trust with Mozilla between moves like this, their in-browser advertising, their continual re-enabling of the user studies telemetry writing over my disabling of it (has happened at least 3x times).
You can't monetize your users if they all stop using your browser, Mozilla. We need an alternative.
Here’s the problem with aggregation. Even if the if is not attributable to you as an individual the data can still be used as a weapon against you. I’ll give an example: Imagine that you are a gay person living in a country that kills gay people by law. If gay people are frequenting websites that indicate they like to hang out at a particular bar, this gives authorities more than enough to target that group while still not using your personal data directly. The indirect aggregated data is just as harmful as if they had targeted you personally. This is where companies try to fool you into thinking you are safe to give them a “non identifiable” advertising id and aggregating your data before selling it. It’s not safe.
> Imagine that you are a gay person living in a country that kills gay people by law. If gay people are frequenting websites that indicate they like to hang out at a particular bar, this gives authorities more than enough to target that group while still not using your personal data directly.
1. what’s stopping current governments doing exactly that right now?
2. how much of the market do you think fits that scenario?
3. what’s stopping people in that scenario trying to protect themselves via the usual methods independent of whatever browser they choose?
Checks date: No, it's not April 1st. Which would have been a fine day to make this announcement and possibly get away with it.
In case you were still on the fence... Mozilla has been trying very hard to eradicate the enormous amount of goodwill they built up over the year. Oh, and it's Facebook, not 'Meta'.
They're not fooling me. These whitewashes should be ignored, and the name should simply always be prepended by the name under which the entity is generally known. Otherwise the likes of Blackwater get to pretend they are Xe or Academi or some other nice clean corporate identity.
Google gets a little bit of leeway because their holding really acts as a holding but in the case of Facebook it is just so you don't immediately associate the name 'Meta' with something vile and ugly.
'Facebook partners with Mozilla' has a different ring to it.
> Advertising provides critical support for the Web
The premise is flawed, IMO. I remember a time when the web was just fine without incessant advertising. If it disappeared it would still be fine. Some sites would die out, others would rise.
I've said it before, but I personally would be fine with every site that relies on advertising for its existence to go away. I also think this would improve the signal:noise ratio of the web considerably.
Thought experiment. Remove all ads from Facebook. Now, the only way corporations can advertise on Facebook is by making Facebook posts on their normal Facebook page; people only see them if they "liked" the company's FB page.
What you've done is slightly reduced huge corporations' advertising effectiveness; and absolutely killed every small internet brand. There's people starting cool clothing, food, perfume, watch brands, starting these companies from rock bottom, getting customers through online ads, and becoming millionaires. The vast majority aren't dropshipper idiots; they're legit brands, many of which eventually get acquired by a Fortune 500 corp.
This isn't the 90s. Online ads are just essential to getting companies off the ground nowadays. What should people do? Mail-order magazine ads? (still ads.) Cold calling? (isn't that more intrusive than online ads?)
There's other aspects too. Kill online ads and you kill a huge chunk of the social mobility that results from entrepreneurship. There's two paths to wealth nowadays: getting a great job, or starting a company. In your ideal world, the only "path" left is the same old "golden path" our parents talked about, of going to a good college, getting 1 or more degrees, and getting a highly paid career at a big corp or SV startup. For various, well-documented reasons, that system ends up excluding tons of people (many ethnic/gender minorities, people with "difficult life paths" who end up dropping out or are unemployable because of gaps in their resume, ex-felons who have paid their debt to society but aren't going to become Apple VPs anytime soon, undocumented immigrants, and many more). Entrepreneurship is an equalizer.
The anti-ad kneejerk reaction often comes from an anti-bigcorp philosophy; but it would only strengthen big corps, and harm any small companies trying to compete. You'd significantly weaken one of the best mechanism we have to reduce social/wealth inequality (entrepreneurship). You have people like HVAC specialists and plumbers advertising their services on Facebook.
On the contrary, I think it would be extremely sinister is just a few big corps (browser makers) could harm huge chunks of the economy and society by mortally crippling the best way entrepreneurs have of getting customers.
I rarely see anti-ad people address any of these concerns. Think of the ramifications; how about every reputable news source being behind a paywall, leaving fake news sites spreading wildly? I'm sure you could come up with hundreds of other dangerous ramifications yourself.
Apart from some outliers I have yet to see anything close to this statement proven true. Not to mention the dubious conflating between "small entrepreneurs & brands" and online ads; my plumber is not advertising on facebook, my plumber is on a map and registry of plumbers of the area, and maybe has an associated page (on facebook, yes) so that people can find him.
All I see here is a long, unconvincing, hand-wavy response. There is nothing essential about online advertising.
For small businesses, there is this thing called organic growth. Say you have a brand, then you can post actually valuable content on, say, Instagram (which would exist without ads, they have multiple ways they make money). This works for both services and products. I have seen many business grow from nothing to 'big' this way with no paid advertising.
I'm not going to bother refuting your other claims, they are equally flawed.
There will be tons of people who will rightly rake Mozilla over the coals for this so I don't need to do it.
That being said I honestly feel for Mozilla in some way. Making a browser as your primary product is just not profitable without monetizing your userbase in some form or fashion and it takes a shit ton of work to keep it modern and secure. They will get dragged through the mud no matter what they try. People still rag on them for accepting money from Google to be the default search engine.
Rubbish. Mozilla would have zero issues getting 10 million users who would pay $100/year for it. Of course it would mean that it will have to become a product company rather than another bored housewives club masquerading as a software company with some software engineers working for it.
If there were a way to directly fund Firefox (and only Firefox, not any other Mozilla stuff), I'd do it in a heartbeat. But I imagine I'm in the minority.
The fact that it’s not even an option really makes me scratch my head. There’s a decent amount of people who would like to throw some money their way to support Firefox specifically. Maybe not a ton, but certainly enough to warrant the option for people to do so.
I definitely would if it meant I wouldn't have to see a single ad ever again. I'm at the point in my life where trading money for not seeing ads is very appealing to me. Between Hulu, Youtube Premium, Spotify, etc. I pay an absurd amount of money every year to not see ads. I'd definitely do the same if a browser could hide any and all ads from me, and the sum I'd pay is a lot more than $100 year.
Sure, but you may as well save that money up as a down payment on a unicorn.
If it were possible to suppress all ads, then many people would happily sell you that solution. And the sites pushing those ads will see the money flowing to those people and not them, and so will grudgingly refuse to serve you any content.
As ad blockers get more popular and more effective, it's already happening more and more.
You can have a magical "don't show me ads" button only as long as it doesn't work very well. (And I have mine: Firefox + µBlock Origin.)
It has a product that people pay for. It finds the market for its product and features for its product not based on "we are Chrome alternative don't pay attention to us sending all the stuff to Google and others who would give us money" but on what its paying customers want to see.
This is our bias seeping in. On HN, I’m willing to bet a substantial proportion of people are willing to pay for an anti-ad/tracking browser for privacy reasons. But there will be no value for the outside world.
I think us “nerds” dramatically overvalue how important privacy is to the general public right now. Even ignoring the developing world, most people will agree that tracking is bad, but most will continue to use legacy browsers because they don’t think it’s 100/year bad. And the growing population of young and tech savvy people who are one Google away from installing uBlock Origin will not pay for your product either.
Not to mention —- even the proportion of HN readers can take other measures to approximate anti tracking anyways. uBlock Origin + Pihole + a good VPN is enough for even most of us (personally, it is enough for me).
Exactly the opposite. Companies would be lining up buying licenses for a competent and supported browser blocking ads for Suzi from accounting to use without needing to tinker around with a uBlock Origin and pihole and a good VPN.
uBlock Origin author specifically states he does not want donations or to sell licenses because he does not want to support the product at all - he wants to do what he wants and not what the "customers" or "donors" might want.
> Mozilla would have zero issues getting 10 million users who would pay $100/year for it
Call me a pessimist but I doubt this. Most people don't mind ads, and when you couple that with the vast number of free browser alternatives, I doubt so many people would pay (and even if they got some, I'd expect churn to be high too).
Quite literally every single company with aspirations would immediately subscribe to it because absolutely no one wants their company information being leaked out to Google or Facebook or anyone else if they do not absolutely have to. Right now there is no such option.
It would be plenty profitable without their organizational bloat, especially if they refocused on what their actual users want instead of other initiatives.
How? donations. Look how much money Wikipedia generates in donations every year without selling out their users. Even a small fraction of this amount should be plenty to pay competitive salaries to the Firefox dev team, but the Firefox development team is a small fraction of their org.
Exactly, Firefox development should not be run like a for-profit corporation. Besides individual donations, they should try to get funding from pro-privacy governments.
> Making a browser as your primary product is just not profitable without monetizing your userbase in some form or fashion and it takes a shit ton of work to keep it modern and secure.
Then why can I not purchase Mozilla merch? They shutdown or abandoned some of their most interesting services (MDN and Send, for example), but kept developing unneeded products : (1) VPN, which is just a layer over Mullvad that makes it worse and (2) Lockwise which is much better replaced with almost any alternative password manager (like KeePassXC and the browser add-on if you really need it).
Of course, they weren't wrong for at least trying, but then why not make it part of a pool of products that only premium users can access? For example, make it so that only Premium users can upload to Send. But no, all we get is just a sh*t VPN.
Mozilla doesn't want your money, and they're going to die for it.
I find it disappointing. For whatever reason, Mozilla VPN is not available in my country. And they don't support anonymous cash payments, like Mullvad does. It's more expensive than Mullvad, except at the 12 month plan. So what's the point? It's strictly inferior to Mullvad.
I mean, there are tons of massively successful free (beer and liberty) software that have been around for decades. Why does Mozilla need Meta's or Google's money? Why have other free software products (thinking of OSes like FreeBSD and OpenBSD here) had active, high-quality development for decades without resorting to harvesting user data for profit? Isn't Mozilla a non-profit corporation? Hell, their website's title is "Internet for people, not profit", so what's happening here? And like someone else raised, why isn't there Mozilla and Firefox official swag?!
Mozilla can follow FreeBSD and OpenBSD's example and achieve a marketshare just as negligible as theirs. And just like FreeBSD and OpenBSD, Mozilla can wave goodbye to official support by any major consumer service or software.
Mozilla doesn't have normal swag but they sell Mozilla VPN. You can also donate directly to the foundation. The lack of gear is a little weird though because they used to have a gear store but they shut it down. I suspect not enough gear was being sold to be worth the trouble of selling official gear.
Those projects are funded by engineers from Netflix and Netapp who do make plenty of money off that software.
Nobody does the same with Firefox. Really the only prominent external contributor (that I know of at least) is Martin Stransky of Red Hat who does a lot of the Linux maintainence.
> That being said I honestly feel for Mozilla in some way. Making a browser as your primary product is just not profitable without monetizing your userbase in some form or fashion and it takes a shit ton of work to keep it modern and secure.
Why does it need to be profitable? Firefox is owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, the corp is only there to help develop it. If the corp can't work without making the browser work then the foundation should reconsider if the corp is a good idea. Unfortunately, the leadership of the foundation and the corp are not separate enough so they cannot effectively push for the interests of the foundation.
Librewolf[0] is probably the best alternative, drop-in replacement for firefox in terms of privacy. It's essentially (base firefox + privacy patches + privacy policies and configs), and available on Windows, Mac, Ubuntu, and more.
edit: Expect though that some parts of the web won't work with it since WebGL and DRM are disabled.
So I understand they're doing this because it's their revenue source and they feel they have to play ball, but this pretty much means they're done.
After having lost many battles and flags the one thing they have is that they're not helping them spy on you, it's barely enough to keep them relevant, and they want to dump that too.
That's what happens when the people in charge of taking the decisions are not representative of the core users of the product, and thus don't understand what makes the product good or bad for their users. You will not find 1% of current Firefox users by choice who would say they think this is a good decision.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 420 ms ] thread[1] https://github.com/jkarlin/topics
This technology is designed to measure "conversion", e.g., when people click on an ad and then buy the corresponding product in a privacy-preserving way.
Or was before the last "redesign".
I guess ungoogled chromium might be a solution.
Or: what's a decent ad blocking solution for modern Safari?
PCM leaks some information about user behavior, but it has a high degree of uncertainty due to the structure of the reporting. So, you might be able to say that there is an X% chance someone saw this ad. IPA is intended only to reveal aggregate information. The price of this is (1) computational complexity and (2) that you have to have some level of trust in the aggregators (e.g., you trust that they don't collude).
PCM doesn't work in cases where the click and the conversion (purchase) happen on different devices (e.g., a phone and a laptop). IPA potentially does.
Ben Savage's slides cover this in more detail: https://github.com/patcg/meetings/blob/main/2022/02/09-telec...
The slides imply that losing cross device attribution is a regression. It absolutely is not, as such ability does not currently exist. So this
While I recognize the advertisers may want attribution, but it still seems like FB+Google both still want to know as much about the user as possible, and both definitely have the resources to achieve the de-anonymising attacks (especially given chrome's ever present attempts to get people to tie their entire browsing session to their google identity).
Re whether this is a regression or not: I am not an expert on how the current attribution mechanism works but I believe that if people are logged into (for instance) Facebook then Facebook can use that to correlate clicks on device A with purchases on device B.
they were the first to do it natively and properly. but my excitement didn't last. i was having a hard time with their bazillion settings. i wanted something that works well out of the box. i know some people like all these possible options but it was not for me.
nowadays, i use edge for vertical tabs.
edge is chrome with vertical tabs in my world. but it would be cool if the minimized sidebar didn't expand on hover. it's a user experience nightmare. (in case any engineer on the edge project is reading)
So much of this feels weird to me.
I don't understand how I'm supposed to take Mozilla partnering with Facebook, I don't understand why I'm supposed to believe that Facebook would ever have beneficial insight to add to a privacy standard or that it would ever do anything other than try to weaken the standard.
I can't read up on the IPA standard because the link is currently being vandalized, so I can't really comment on that, but this is dangerous ground to tread and also I vaguely feel like as a user I might want to not have ads attributed across devices.
Before anybody jumps in and yells about how Mozilla is worse than Google, let me point out that Firefox is still objectively the best browser to use for privacy right now. But crud this announcement is weird and vaguely tone-deaf and doesn't make me feel good, and I think at the very least it should have been worded less as a celebration, or at least should have spent more time going into why I shouldn't feel uncomfortable about the whole thing.
It's potentially a longer conversation, but the article also doesn't really make a strong case for why I should be rooting for a privacy-respecting system for advertisers in the first place.
I don’t think that’s why you want FB/Meta here. But you want to make sure this is useful enough for the ad companies so this actually becomes a solution. If you build a super private solution no advertising company wants/can use, then you’re just wasting time.
Assuming the competition is standard built by Google within itself, this makes sense.
(Meta employee, don’t work on ads, opinions my own)
Which is why regulation is needed. Otherwise, any solution needs to be more attractive to the advertisers than the people they stalk (i.e. everybody else).
Moreover lobbying runs US govt. Tech non profits are financed largely by megacorps so they won't necessarily bite the hand that feed them.
Meta will happily use any data they can access about people, and this will just be an additional data point that augments the extensive behavioral profiles they have on most internet users.
This is yet another attempt to not accept no for an answer when it comes to data collection, because not getting any data on users who refused data collection is unfathomable to them.
I guess the question though is: is Facebook going to stop delivering ads if the solution isn't good enough? Why is it important that Facebook like the system?
Facebook was very upset about Apple's privacy changes, it didn't get rid of ads on iOS. It's been very upset about a lot of things. What throws me in these conversations is that I'm not sure why the solution has to be one that Facebook is happy with. What Facebook would be happy with is as much data as they're allowed to have. And also, Facebook doesn't really have veto powers over what anyone else does, so it's not like we need to find a middle ground with the company.
Part of the problem of building a solution that's good enough that advertisers won't want more is that it's difficult to believe that solution exists. Facebook is pretty clear that the constraints on what they'll collect is defined in their internal/public privacy policies, and within that constraint they will collect as much data as the platform offers.
I'm not aware of any instances of a platform offering an ad attribution system that was privacy preserving, and having Facebook (or other companies) decide not to do any fingerprinting or insert any tracking links into pages, or use any cookies on that platform. I also find it really hard to believe that if Mozilla cracks down on fingerprinting and doesn't provide an alternative that Facebook is happy with, that Facebook will stop selling ads.
And that solution by Apple seemed to actually work in many respects.
I'm really fed up with Mozilla. I've always used and believed in them but this just feels so odd.
Better to work on things like size limits and board-per-mile maximums with the billboard manufacturers.
The real question is why is my supposedly privacy preserving interface colluding with this advertiser at all? I do not want them involved in my interface and it seems contrary to Mozilla's userbase's interests.
Google at least went to the trouble of building a new browser and taking over the market. Facebook hasn't done anything to be involved except have money to pay off a seemingly corrupt mozzila
We are under no obligation to negotiate. Destroying the whole industry is on the table.
This is a worthy goal, and has been achieved in some jurisdictions. No wind required.
Hawaii, Vermont, Maine, Alaska.
That's not the expectation at all, in fact quite the opposite.
Giving concessions to advertisers doesn't make anything change. Anti-fingerprinting is the way you stop advertisers from fingerprinting. Nothing else short of legislation will work, and even legislation doesn't always work in every scenario.
Expecting advertisers to behave just because you gave them a more private attribution system is like expecting ants to stop going onto your countertops just because you put a cupcake on the floor.
The question is, given that Facebook will always take as much data as they are able to technically extract from the browser, and given that you're correct and advertisers are not going to stop advertising on the Internet regardless of what restrictions are put up -- why is it important to make them happy or to give the company concessions? Building a system that Facebook is happy with won't make its behavior change, so why do we care if they like the things we build?
More generally, though, I have to ask: do we want an ever-escalating arms race or a negotiated peace?
I have yet to see an evidence that a negotiated peace is possible, and I have seen a lot of evidence that suggests to me that it is impossible.
I personally would rather see hard anti-fingerprinting features in browsers, potentially combined with legislation to fill in the gaps. I have seen a lot of evidence from platforms like iOS, and from web standards like deprecating cookies, that advertisers are only willing to come to the table after they've already lost, and that they only come to the table to weaken existing standards.
I have a lot of criticism of Apple, but I look at some of the changes in iOS that were made in regards to Facebook, and it's hard for me not to conclude that the best ways to tangibly improve privacy on platforms like Facebook are to just move forward without its permission. I look at adblockers the same way, there were no conversations about acceptable ads until advertisers thought it was possible that adblockers might become widespread.
It's not clear to me what a negotiated peace would entail or how to get there, but it is very clear to me how to improve anti-fingerprinting measures and how to pass legislation. Yes, that means that we're in an arms race, but if we understand that advertisers are always going to advocate for more tracking, it follows that a theoretical negotiated peace would also need to be constantly renegotiated over and over again.
Short of burning the industry to the ground and not having ads online, which I think is a separate conversation, I don't believe there is a stable solution to advertising and privacy. Whether it's legislation or technology or industry standards, they will always need to be defended and reinforced and renegotiated. There will always be advertisers arguing that they should be more lax. And I think that's part of why the idea of an arms race isn't that scary to me, because to me all of it is an arms race, including negotiated acceptable ad standards.
That's not a choice that's being offered. There is no reason to expect advertising platforms like Google or Facebook to ever be happy with "enough tracking". If they can get more information, they will want more, regardless of any "negotiations". This has been shown pretty clearly with the DoNotTrack header (now itself a tracking element), and the GDPR cookie policies.
So the only solution is war on tracking.
Yup, that's about where I'm at. Standard Oil wasn't broken up because a lot of people made extremely rational arguments about how much monopolies hurt long term economic health to Rockefeller and he just changed his mind. It was broken up because the government stepped in.
Advertising is costing America an intense amount of productivity and we're going to need regulations and constraints to help restrict it (vermont has greatly benefited from said billboard restrictions)
How so?
See DRM/piracy, see Tor, see Linux, etc. For a sufficiently-determined consumer, there's always a way.
The only things running against that grain are the odd bills like the EARN IT act, which seldom pass due to public uproar.
But on the topic: at least in the US, if we're talking a legal solution, there won't be one that doesn't factor in the needs of Fortune 500 companies. And attempts to build solutions not factoring them in in Europe got us, well, the GDPR and infinite consent dialogs.
Better to bring parties to the table than try to hash a solution that pretends they don't have interests here.
But there was over a decade of frameworks built on the old "collect everything and use it later" model. By default, even Apache collects enough information to be considered a GDPR violation.
Throwing a dialog up and putting one cookie on the end-user's machine was the simplest possible way; the alternative was a mass audit of all dependencies.
(... and if anyone drafting the law didn't realize this, it would strongly indicate they didn't pull enough industry people into the process to draft a good law).
Nobody understands the ad industry better than advertisers. Incentivize them to compromise and we're more likely to get something that actually works than incentivizing them to get creative in finding legal loopholes.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say the comparison suggests an extremist position that should have no business dictating the law on the topic (still a position worth hearing while seeking compromise, of course).
Maybe the ideal is that it's none of those things, that advertising in theory should be about matching consumers with the product they'd like best - but the fact is that in the age of the Internet, it's been nothing but unwelcome manipulation, and everyone puts up with it because it's the only funding model that's "free" at the point of use.
It's about time for them to lose some power.
[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/461383-people-are-taking-th...
> What Facebook would be happy with is as much data as they're allowed to have.
Indeed. However, platform owners like Apple and Google are currently in a privileged position, where they make rules for others to follow but are free to collect any and all data they want.
> While we believe that Apple’s move to eliminate IDFA was done in the spirit of advancing consumer privacy, it may ultimately provide Apple with an advertising platform that is competitively advantaged vs. peers who don’t have access to Apple’s richer APIs
The rest of your comment suggested they want to track users.
It's always tricky to talk about Apple's positions on privacy. In some areas they are very good, but in some areas they are very good at appearing to be very good. I think that Apple itself wants to be able to do some level of attribution on the web. I think that Apple is under a lot more stress from regulators than Mozilla is. Obviously Apple has an inherent interest in making it look like that's not the case and that they're just solely on the side of privacy.
I also think your concern about Apple/Google privileging their own platforms is completely accurate. However, I don't think that the solution to that is to make privacy worse in other areas, I would rather see Apple/Google hold themselves to the same standards that they hold other companies.
In short, I'm not angry at Apple for the changes it's making because they hurt Facebook, I'm angry at Apple for either ignoring those changes itself or making sure that those changes don't apply to parts of iOS and the web that are important to Apple. This has come up a couple of times with iOS; it's good that 3rd-party apps have more restrictions on tracking, I wish the built-in apps were the same.
We've already asked you repeatedly not to post flamewar comments on HN. Not cool.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Does that include HN? Which is funded by an in-house advertising system with job ads that appear as sponsored posts?
Not really. I don't want any advertising company to use any information about me under any circumstances. Working towards that goal is not wasting my time.
As Apple has proven, this is simply not true: you just need the entities that control the browser / OS.
This implies that it’s not “collaboration with adtech” that you want, but rather “collaboration with the biggest browser vendors”. Unfortunately the biggest browser is in hands of Google.
Thus Google has a huge influence in this. But any other adtech company (including FB/meta) has no meaningful contribution.
FB = ads. It is their business imperative. Even if you are a campus janitor, you are "working on ads."
But this is a technical document about browser features, I'm a little frustrated that this is being coordinated over a proprietary SaaS service instead of over Git[0] with markdown or something.
I think a lot more than that, I'm frustrated that the document is being made publicly available on that platform. When someone links to a web standard on Github, often it's because the standard is seeing active participation. For something that is being linked to a public view, I would have loved to see at least a PDF export or something.
It's not that it's completely inexcusable, I'm sure Mozilla is making use of Google Doc features, markups, contribution history, whatever. It is just disappointing to see that apparently there isn't an Open collaboration platform that Mozilla thinks is good enough for this process, even a self-hosted one.
It's not the biggest deal in the world, it just feels like a bad look to see Mozilla tout that it's built this great standard, and then click on the link and get sent to a Google Doc. I mean... this article is about privacy, if I'm currently signed into Google and I click on this link, does it mean anything that Google now knows I personally clicked on it? I know it's not the end of the world, but Mozilla literally just finished telling me how good it was at anonymizing data, and now it's leaking my reading habits to Google in an extremely targeted, de-anonymized form.
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[0]: Yes, I know that many standards processes on the web use Github, which is also a proprietary SaaS, but at least the majority of that process (issue tracker aside) is usable just as an endpoint.
Mozilla has been hosting an EtherPad instance for some time now, which may have worked in place of Google Docs for this.
https://pad.mozilla.org
https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/5410
Sadly that's not the only thing that will be closed if Mozilla keep focusing on the wrong things.
Again, I know that Github is also SaaS, but there's a difference. That kind of stuff should be handled differently.
Then maybe the public SaaS services should be of a better quality so that Mozilla employees want to use them.
>I think a lot more than that, I'm frustrated that the document is being made publicly available on that platform. When someone links to a web standard on Github, often it's because the standard is seeing active participation. For something that is being linked to a public view, I would have loved to see at least a PDF export or something.
There is a PDF export for google docs which is available to all users. File > Download > PDF.
Maybe a company that has been throwing money into dozens of random privacy initiatives outside of the browser market (some good and some bad) would be a good fit for solving that problem? Dogfooding software is a really good strategy for UX design after all.
> There is a PDF export for google docs which is available to all users. File > Download > PDF.
That's exactly what I mean. Someone wrote this blog post, could they have hit the PDF export button and then linked to that PDF hosted on Mozilla's servers? That would have prevented the vandalism problem they ran into.
The issue I have isn't that I can't export to PDF from Google Docs. The issue that I have is that I have to visit Google Docs and load a ton of proprietary Javascript just so I can hit a PDF export button. Google Docs has an API, Mozilla could have a script that's just auto-exporting a PDF and hosting it on a public endpoint on a regular interval.
You should take it the exact same way as when:
- Mozilla put proprietary, closed-source DRM (widevine) into their product
- Mozilla put nonconsensual (opt-out) telemetry (aka spyware) into their product
- Mozilla put Google backend services into their product
- Mozilla put advertising/paid placement into their product
The "Mozilla is about privacy and open standards" meme is a false one and has been for a long time. Actions speak a lot louder than words.
I did raise a stink over closed-source DRM, I raised a stink not just over Firefox adding it, I raised a stink over the entire web standards process. I have raised stinks about telemetry and advertising within Firefox. I've raised stinks about Pocket being purchased and not Open Sourced, and then integrated into the browser by default. I've raised stink about a lot of things.
Nevertheless, it is still objectively true that Mozilla Firefox is the best mainstream browser right now for privacy, and anyone who argues otherwise is either not looking at the bigger picture or hasn't done much research into how companies do the majority of their tracking online. The privacy problems that Mozilla has had have objectively less impact on people's everyday privacy than Chromium's hobbled extension support. The ability to turn on anti-fingerprinting features uplifted from Tor is more important than whether or not Google search is enabled by default. Container-extensions are more practically impactful on everyday privacy than Pocket is.
I am literally complaining about and criticizing Mozilla right now, and yet the immediate reaction is to jump on the one positive thing I said and act like I'm somehow ignoring Mozilla's other issues. I'm not ignoring those issues, but the "Mozilla is corrupt and no better than Google" meme is similarly completely ridiculous. Every single other browser on the market including DeGoogled Chromium and Safari are hobbled in ways that make them worse for privacy, and overall Mozilla still as a company has a better track record on fighting for privacy and building privacy-preserving tools than Google/Microsoft/Brave -- at least it has a better track record in the ways that matter.
It is so frustrating to try and have a constructive conversation about real missteps that Mozilla is making when people view anything less than a complete condemnation of the company like that means they're being put on a pedestal. Mozilla isn't perfect, and it's clumsy and sometimes does outright bad stuff, and that is still consistent with them being one of the better corporate privacy advocates on the Internet.
Check the title. It is absolutely on topic. Mozilla is doing this to themselves, each and every one of those is an unforced error. If your mission really is a free and open as well as privacy respecting web you don't invite the largest privacy violator on the planet to the table to have a say. Just like you don't invite serial killers and druglords to your panel on how to combat crime.
If you're trying to insinuate that working with Google or Facebook on this issue means that Mozilla fundamentally doesn't care about privacy, that is a ridiculous, fantastical claim that requires closing your eyes to years of work from the company.
I am right here criticizing Mozilla for partnering with Facebook, they should not be doing that. It's irresponsible and harmful. Nevertheless, Firefox is objectively the most private consumer-grade browser on the market, including Brave and DeGoogled Chromium. Nevertheless, Mozilla has done more to push web privacy forward than the majority of people on this site myself included, and more to push web privacy forward than the entirety of the rest of the browser market.
Even if you are on topic, there's nothing constructive about jumping onto every Mozilla thread arguing that Mozilla is the same as Google when they're very clearly not. It's unproductive because I shouldn't even need to be wasting my time defending a company that I came here to criticize. It makes it harder to fix real problems when all of them are equated and treated as being identically severe, and when the conclusion everyone draws from every problem is "use something based on Chrome and give up on the entire effort".
The 'years of work from the company' are fantastic, but should not give them a pass in the present, given that the last couple of years most of that goodwill has been burned.
They don't do this, though. I speculate (without any direct knowledge of the situation) that this is because they believe that the majority of their users would opt for this build instead, and they would lose "insights" (and of course revenue).
Someone, somewhere, is prioritizing "line go up and to the right" over embodying the fundamental ethos of a privacy-focused company. If you ship private software, there is of course no line.
I don't know how you can possibly read either my comments or the general tone of the other people responding to me as giving Mozilla a pass on this, or naively assuming the best about them.
Even with that criticism, it is still just plain silly to say that Mozilla even in its modern state is not meaningfully different from Google/Facebook/etc. You can be as cynical as you want to be, but if you can't tell the difference between Chrome/Chromium and Firefox today, then that's not cynicism, it's either a lack of realism or a lack of attention.
I've gone into a few of the tangible differences elsewhere, but even in recent years and even with recent missteps, it's still pretty obvious that Mozilla is better on privacy and user rights than Google is. And it's OK to want better than Mozilla. It's OK to want a company that takes more hard-line stances and that pushes harder on its core browser. Lots of people want that, myself included. Doesn't change anything about what I've said above though.
'better than Google', after Facebook the #2 privacy violator on the plant isn't much of a bar.
> And it's OK to want better than Mozilla. It's OK to want a company that takes more hard-line stances and that pushes harder on its core browser.
Mozilla claims to be that company, and that is why I have a problem with all these issues. Once upon a time they were the gold standard, that's no longer true today.
And it is the only bar to clear. Here's the list of browser makers we have right now:
- Google
- Microsoft
- Apple
- Brave
- Some people off someplace trying desperately to make Gecko secure.
- Some people off someplace trying desperately to make V8/Electron/Chromium competitive on privacy.
- Some proprietary stuff like Vivaldi that's also based on Chromium.
- Mozilla
Mozilla wins that fight. They are still the gold standard by virtue of nobody else being able to make a competitively private browser.
> Mozilla claims to be that company
Even with its faults, Mozilla is still completely accurate in claiming that they push meaningfully harder for both privacy and user agency on the web than other browser manufacturers. Now, as you say, that may be a low bar to clear. But given that no one else is even trying to clear the bar, that is still a meaningful difference between Mozilla and its competition.
----
I think the biggest issue I have with these kinds of debates is that there's never anything constructive or new being offered, it's not even pointing out a new criticism. I know about Mozilla's failings as a company, you're not illuminating anything for me on that front, I know about all of their controversies. So you've identified that Mozilla could be better, great. Now what?
There's value in pointing out problems when it actually draws attention to an issue, but everybody on this thread knows what the issues are with Mozilla. And it is still obvious that Mozilla is noticeably better on these issues than the rest of the browser market, and that Mozilla is still doing quite a lot of good in that space. You're commenting on a thread of people who are pointing out Mozilla's flaws and telling it to do better -- and you're putting those people down and calling them naive.
Well, if pointing out Mozilla's flaws and telling them to be better is a waste of time, what would you propose instead? Moving over to Chrome? Pretending that indie Gekko projects have the resources to be private or secure? Giving up on the entire thing and not using the web anymore? I mean, drop a donation link to Servo, do something other than snubbing people for caring about trying to make the web better. You have exactly one available group of allies in this fight, and your response to that is to call them naive and say they're not good enough.
You're talking to someone who likely agrees with you on the vast majority of your privacy stances, and who is actively criticizing Mozilla right now, but that's not enough unless it's paired with despair and a complete dismissal of the company? Don't you see how that's unhelpful? And it's not even accurate: Mozilla may have "fallen", but they are still overall doing more good than harm in this area and they are still producing the best browser for privacy on the market. There's a huge lack of perspective in the doom-and-gloom takes, they're just as narrow and selective as the the view that Mozilla can do nothing wrong -- it's acting like all of the recent work on ETP and supercookies just doesn't exist or something, it's as if DoS or multi-account containers were never made. The Tor Uplift project only started in 2016 and only went live in mainline Firefox in 2019, but sure, Mozilla isn't doing anything for privacy now.
I'm curious about why you believe this about Ungoogled Chromium, as I had concluded the opposite after researching.
DeGoogled Chromium does actually have less telemetry problems than Firefox, so it's really easy for DeGoogled Chromium proponents to say that it's the most private. The issue is that DeGoogled Chromium is Chromium, and Chromium is a less privacy-capable browser engine than Firefox.
That could be a longer conversation, but the short versions:
- Chromium lacks a number of privacy features that Firefox has, including some anti-fingerprinting options that can be enabled through `about:config`, and container support, which is a really big deal for isolating site data and avoiding correlating user sessions on websites like Github/Youtube/etc... with incidental visits to those sites.
- Chromium's extension API is hobbled, particularly in a couple of areas that Ublock Origin cares about. The wiki goes into more detail on this[0].
----
The mistake is in looking at the small amount of (admittedly bad) data-leakage that Firefox does have and being so worried about that information being sent to Google/Cloudflare that you pick a browser that is less good at keeping you private on every other site you visit, including visits to Google/Cloudflare pages.
Thinking practically about this stuff is just a really hard thing to learn to do, at least it is for me. Maybe other people are magically good at it. But I regularly find that it's helpful for me to sit down and think through my privacy goals more tangibly in the form of "how much data is X actually leaking, what should my priorities be based on the volume/nature?" A lot of people worry about privacy problems in the wrong order.
DeGoogled Chromium does have better defaults than Firefox in multiple areas. It's just that the privacy benefits from those changes don't outweigh a crippled Ublock Origin install.
[0]: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/wiki/uBlock-Or...
For reference: `privacy.resistFingerprinting`
I'll give another example - look at their Sync system. It's a pseudo-open unholy mess of Mozilla-unique ("proprietary" as in "owned by and unique to a certain company") standards without any regard for interoperabilty and openness. I'm 99% positive it could've been a couple of standard technologies, but they reinvented everything (auth, blob storage, everything) in absolutely unnecessarily unique manner, and awfully overengineered. I've had pleasure of attempting an alternative implementation based on their specs (to self-host, had to abandon because it's all way too hostile), so I know what I'm talking about. It's under a guise of "open standards" (in a sense it happens to be partially documented) but no single engineer in their sane mind would adopt this for their own projects.
Privacy and security? Last time I've checked (admittedly, a couple years ago) it was years since they knew their Firefox Account/Sync auth has security issues and has to trust Mozilla servers to be secure (login form and cryptography suite is not built into browser, like in proper end-to-end encrypted software, but served online), and they didn't do a thing about it, entirely dismissing it as a non-issue. Could've sent that password over HTTPS and just promise to not to save it (actually my alternative now-dead Accounts/Sync implementation did just that as a shortcut). In other words, Mozilla gets a nice gag order (or gets hacked) and they can be forced to circumvent all their end-to-end encryption pull your browsing history just fine without changing a thing on your machine so no local code audit would help. That's not how privacy-conscious software is written (e.g. Signal - it might get backdoored, but it'll need an update to deliver a backdoor).
It doesn't help that there are no alternatives I'm aware of. Firefox sucks but that's - sadly - the best we have.
I'm not saying "this is it", but here's a (IMO) reasonable line of thought why they would genuinely be working in that direction. Basically, short term pain for long term security. There is a clear preference by consumers for preserving privacy; the percentage of iOS users not allowing targeting since IDFA is proof. There is also political motivation for regulators to crack down on the wild west of online privacy in the US (FB scapegoating) and abroad (GDPR and co). If there is to be a hard turn by regulators and hardware/OS providers for privacy protection and FB does not prepare for it by preparing Audience Network to operate without granular personal data, their whole business model would be at risk and their terminal value threatened. Being prepared for a world placing privacy first protects their financial interests, likely even putting them ahead of competitors that are going in unprepared.
If voting power at FB was majority owned by Wall Street shareholders, you could argue it's unlikely they would hurt operating income for years rather than milk it even if it's protective long term. But that's not the case, Mark does have a super majority and can afford governing for the long term even if it makes analysts critical.
Well, the headline says "privacy preserving attribution for advertising". I'm guessing Facebook provides expertise in what kind of attribution advertisers want.
It's not a bigger story.
THE story - in fact, the REVELATION - here is that Mozilla thinks it's OK to cooperate with Facebook on PRIVACY work. You can't make this shit up. Not even on hard drugs.
If Facebook doesn't use this method, the work towards private attribution that Mozilla is doing doesn't matter.
Furthermore, Mozilla is requesting feedback from everyone, not just Facebook, which helps keep Facebook (and Mozilla) honest in this process.
What alternative would you propose?
How about not working with the fox on the least invasive way to eat my fellow hens?
How about not figuring out how to support advertising needs? They can just stick to figuring out privacy.
> What alternative would you propose?
They could focus on user needs. Having an ad-blocker by default would be a good start. Figuring out how to remove advertisers and the incentive to advertise (and thus SEO spam etc.) from the internet is a goal I would support.
The only people who are excited to see Mozilla partner with Facebook are advertisers. I disagree that Mozilla needs Facebook's particular input on this, but ignoring that, even if we say that they do, I'm still somewhat at a loss why they would expect normal readers to be excited about seeing Facebook's name pop up in an article title or why they would think that's something worth bragging about.
It reads like an article written for advertisers, with some fluff (maybe the standard is good, but they're not really going into detail) that basically amounts to "also don't worry, this isn't that bad for you."
I mentioned this further up above, but regardless of whether you like targeted advertising or not, this article still doesn't really make the case why I as a user should be excited about the idea that attribution should work across devices. I don't understand how any of this is good for me as a user outside of the broad idea of "ads pay for things, so you should care if advertisers are happy."
If it works, the improvement for users is that it provides similar monetization for sites (which benefits users in the broad way you described) but without advertisers tracking individuals across sites.
Stop worrying about what companies want and focus on your users. Advertisers are not Firefox users. Firefox users want to block ads, not have sanctioned tracking.
That work already doesn't matter before it begins. There is no solution Facebook will support that actually preserves user privacy, because their core business model is based on broad surveillance.
Any resulting standard will be user hostile and/or useless to advertisers.
This makes the endeavor obviously a waste of resources on Mozilla's part (unless, of course, they plan on selling out their own users to advertisers, in which case it's a great first step).
Am glad Mozilla's true commercialization intentions are coming full circle. They recently introduced Firefox suggest[0]. Maybe they can finally retire the privacy-first corporate-goobly talk they have been parading for quite some time and join the adtech space as a fresh objectively neutral player.
[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2021/09/15/data-and-firefox-su...
So I will be that "anybody". On what do you base your opinion about firefox privacy? Because I reading across the web have got another impression, for example, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9374407
Short version, deficiencies in Chromium and Safari as browser engines are large enough that they outweigh most telemetry concerns. Browsers like Brave can disable some telemetry, sure, but they can't add in the larger set of features that are missing from Chromium. Browser telemetry is worth thinking about and considering, but you should be less concerned about browser telemetry than you are about Ublock Origin performance.
For this case? I'm sure that there is a good reason. I'm not a Mozilla anymore, so I haven't followed that story, but I imagine that the rationale is something along the lines of "These days, stuff we do in the browser don't have much impact, as web standards have been superseded by Chrome. However, whenever we manage to convince a big company such as Facebook to do even one thing better, we can improve the lives of billions of people."
PR impact might not be good, though.
Mozilla gets hundreds of millions of $ from Google every year?
Any wonder why Mozilla was the last one to jump on the privacy bandwagon? And now they are holding hands with another big privacy invader.
I guess they want some financial contributions from Meta too since Google's don't cover the C-tier compensation bump.
Okay, until now I gave them some benefit of the doubt. Now Mozilla don’t even try to hide how hypocritical they are.
Being financially independent is great, but only if you survive. I'd take a partially Google-funded independent project that publicly goes against Google's interests all the time over one that Google develops in-house to 100% serve their agenda anytime.
> "Mozilla can live without Google's Money, Baker says"
> "Mozilla Corp. will walk away from Google Inc. and the millions it collects from the search company each year, if that's what it takes to stay independent, the open-source developer's CEO promised"
14 years later, it continues to be on life support by their own anti-privacy competitors since they cannot make any significant revenue sources other than Google's money despite promising to 'walk away' years ago. They know that they can't be 'privacy-first' in their mission statement whilst still taking Google's money. Working with Facebook on this is another way for Mozilla to abandon it's 'privacy-first' selling point which at this point is now meaningless.
Mozilla will never change. Even after 14 years.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...
1) They did go without Google for a couple of years. They had a partnership with Bing, and Yahoo for quite a while. But Bing and Yahoo remain rounding errors in the search market.
2) 2007 was before Google started dominating with Chrome - before Android even. 2007 was near peak Mozilla. To some degree, fighting Google probably contributed to their decline.
They have two choices - work with industry players to find the least privacy-intrusive ways for them to keep doing what they do or give up, accept Google Chrome as the one and only browser and let Google develop constant user tracking as a native browser feature that can't be disabled.
Mozzila does dumb shit all the time and they need to be called out for it. But they are still around, despite their competitor's revenue being over 300x theirs and their market share dropping to below 5%. They still regularly and often successfully oppose Google's attempts at steering web standards to their benefit, despite Google being their main source of funding. Their browser still has the best privacy features out of the box and supports the widest variety of privacy-enhancing extensions.
Like it or not, they are our only hope. A "privacy-first" company means a dead company. Mozilla and every other project (Signal, Telegram, Brave...) is "Survival first, privacy second" and that's still better than the alternative - "profit first, privacy not even a consideration".
The money from Google doesn't just buy the default serch engine setting, it is a HUGE incentive for Mozilla to not rock the boat.
Briefly, it should be possible to "disable" this feature by instead encrypting a random match key, which would look the same as having it enabled but merely not be useful for measurement. Obviously, one would need to work through the details of how to make this work in a complete protocol, so this is a little handwavy, but it's definitely a consideration.
Also DNT is not useless modulo new human rights legislation like the GDPR. I would hope that data protection regulators settle on seeing DNT as an explicit sign of non-consent, and punish websites who try to fraudulently obtain consent with annoying popups etc.
Ungoogled Chromium is my daily driver.
I might just manually copy the profile directory to my laptop when I leave, and copy the newer one back to my desktop when I get home. Mutex! TBH I can really only be using one browser at a given time so "sync" seems like overkill as long as I've only two hands and two eyeballs.
That said, sandboxes aren't all or nothing, and my impression is that the chromium sandbox is still tighter than Firefox's. (I work for Mozilla, but not on sandboxing, and I'm not in touch with the current state.) That is improving over time, and Firefox already has some types of sandboxing that are ahead of Chrome's.
The main threat model here is malware, probably malware being served to you through an ad network. Run an ad blocker.
Personally, I defend the principle of an ad-funded Web. But not the current practice. As long as ads are in practice an exploit vector, screw 'em.
Unless using an ad blocker your browser is not doing anything to actively prevent it, and there is no meaningful difference between chrome / Firefox / edge there.
1. This is a technical proposal. It has not been incorporated into Firefox; I don't think there are even patches for it at this point.
2. Safari actually already implements a different technology designed to achieve somewhat similar objectives. https://webkit.org/blog/11529/introducing-private-click-meas...
You can't monetize your users if they all stop using your browser, Mozilla. We need an alternative.
1. what’s stopping current governments doing exactly that right now?
2. how much of the market do you think fits that scenario?
3. what’s stopping people in that scenario trying to protect themselves via the usual methods independent of whatever browser they choose?
In case you were still on the fence... Mozilla has been trying very hard to eradicate the enormous amount of goodwill they built up over the year. Oh, and it's Facebook, not 'Meta'.
Google gets a little bit of leeway because their holding really acts as a holding but in the case of Facebook it is just so you don't immediately associate the name 'Meta' with something vile and ugly.
'Facebook partners with Mozilla' has a different ring to it.
Which projects currently under the Mozilla/Firefox umbrella are worth splitting off and funding?
The premise is flawed, IMO. I remember a time when the web was just fine without incessant advertising. If it disappeared it would still be fine. Some sites would die out, others would rise.
I've said it before, but I personally would be fine with every site that relies on advertising for its existence to go away. I also think this would improve the signal:noise ratio of the web considerably.
That is from the time when not everyone was in the web. Now as basically everyone is here, it is the best place to affect on the minds of people.
That would arguably include HN, which publishes some sponsored threads for YC companies
What you've done is slightly reduced huge corporations' advertising effectiveness; and absolutely killed every small internet brand. There's people starting cool clothing, food, perfume, watch brands, starting these companies from rock bottom, getting customers through online ads, and becoming millionaires. The vast majority aren't dropshipper idiots; they're legit brands, many of which eventually get acquired by a Fortune 500 corp.
This isn't the 90s. Online ads are just essential to getting companies off the ground nowadays. What should people do? Mail-order magazine ads? (still ads.) Cold calling? (isn't that more intrusive than online ads?)
There's other aspects too. Kill online ads and you kill a huge chunk of the social mobility that results from entrepreneurship. There's two paths to wealth nowadays: getting a great job, or starting a company. In your ideal world, the only "path" left is the same old "golden path" our parents talked about, of going to a good college, getting 1 or more degrees, and getting a highly paid career at a big corp or SV startup. For various, well-documented reasons, that system ends up excluding tons of people (many ethnic/gender minorities, people with "difficult life paths" who end up dropping out or are unemployable because of gaps in their resume, ex-felons who have paid their debt to society but aren't going to become Apple VPs anytime soon, undocumented immigrants, and many more). Entrepreneurship is an equalizer.
The anti-ad kneejerk reaction often comes from an anti-bigcorp philosophy; but it would only strengthen big corps, and harm any small companies trying to compete. You'd significantly weaken one of the best mechanism we have to reduce social/wealth inequality (entrepreneurship). You have people like HVAC specialists and plumbers advertising their services on Facebook.
On the contrary, I think it would be extremely sinister is just a few big corps (browser makers) could harm huge chunks of the economy and society by mortally crippling the best way entrepreneurs have of getting customers.
I rarely see anti-ad people address any of these concerns. Think of the ramifications; how about every reputable news source being behind a paywall, leaving fake news sites spreading wildly? I'm sure you could come up with hundreds of other dangerous ramifications yourself.
Apart from some outliers I have yet to see anything close to this statement proven true. Not to mention the dubious conflating between "small entrepreneurs & brands" and online ads; my plumber is not advertising on facebook, my plumber is on a map and registry of plumbers of the area, and maybe has an associated page (on facebook, yes) so that people can find him.
For small businesses, there is this thing called organic growth. Say you have a brand, then you can post actually valuable content on, say, Instagram (which would exist without ads, they have multiple ways they make money). This works for both services and products. I have seen many business grow from nothing to 'big' this way with no paid advertising.
I'm not going to bother refuting your other claims, they are equally flawed.
That being said I honestly feel for Mozilla in some way. Making a browser as your primary product is just not profitable without monetizing your userbase in some form or fashion and it takes a shit ton of work to keep it modern and secure. They will get dragged through the mud no matter what they try. People still rag on them for accepting money from Google to be the default search engine.
why would anyone pay for a browser when all the rest of them are free?
The browser that does not track you, does not report to Google or facebook, etc? That's why.
If it were possible to suppress all ads, then many people would happily sell you that solution. And the sites pushing those ads will see the money flowing to those people and not them, and so will grudgingly refuse to serve you any content.
As ad blockers get more popular and more effective, it's already happening more and more.
You can have a magical "don't show me ads" button only as long as it doesn't work very well. (And I have mine: Firefox + µBlock Origin.)
I think us “nerds” dramatically overvalue how important privacy is to the general public right now. Even ignoring the developing world, most people will agree that tracking is bad, but most will continue to use legacy browsers because they don’t think it’s 100/year bad. And the growing population of young and tech savvy people who are one Google away from installing uBlock Origin will not pay for your product either.
Not to mention —- even the proportion of HN readers can take other measures to approximate anti tracking anyways. uBlock Origin + Pihole + a good VPN is enough for even most of us (personally, it is enough for me).
uBlock Origin author specifically states he does not want donations or to sell licenses because he does not want to support the product at all - he wants to do what he wants and not what the "customers" or "donors" might want.
Call me a pessimist but I doubt this. Most people don't mind ads, and when you couple that with the vast number of free browser alternatives, I doubt so many people would pay (and even if they got some, I'd expect churn to be high too).
How? donations. Look how much money Wikipedia generates in donations every year without selling out their users. Even a small fraction of this amount should be plenty to pay competitive salaries to the Firefox dev team, but the Firefox development team is a small fraction of their org.
Then why can I not purchase Mozilla merch? They shutdown or abandoned some of their most interesting services (MDN and Send, for example), but kept developing unneeded products : (1) VPN, which is just a layer over Mullvad that makes it worse and (2) Lockwise which is much better replaced with almost any alternative password manager (like KeePassXC and the browser add-on if you really need it).
Of course, they weren't wrong for at least trying, but then why not make it part of a pool of products that only premium users can access? For example, make it so that only Premium users can upload to Send. But no, all we get is just a sh*t VPN.
Mozilla doesn't want your money, and they're going to die for it.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/end-of-support-firefox-...
but the functionality is already built into the browser of the respective platforms?
Mozilla doesn't have normal swag but they sell Mozilla VPN. You can also donate directly to the foundation. The lack of gear is a little weird though because they used to have a gear store but they shut it down. I suspect not enough gear was being sold to be worth the trouble of selling official gear.
Nobody does the same with Firefox. Really the only prominent external contributor (that I know of at least) is Martin Stransky of Red Hat who does a lot of the Linux maintainence.
Why does it need to be profitable? Firefox is owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, the corp is only there to help develop it. If the corp can't work without making the browser work then the foundation should reconsider if the corp is a good idea. Unfortunately, the leadership of the foundation and the corp are not separate enough so they cannot effectively push for the interests of the foundation.
Out of curiosity.... what would the best alternative to Firefox be, in regards to privacy? (macOS/Ubuntu/Windows)
edit: Expect though that some parts of the web won't work with it since WebGL and DRM are disabled.
[0] https://librewolf.net/
After having lost many battles and flags the one thing they have is that they're not helping them spy on you, it's barely enough to keep them relevant, and they want to dump that too.
That's what happens when the people in charge of taking the decisions are not representative of the core users of the product, and thus don't understand what makes the product good or bad for their users. You will not find 1% of current Firefox users by choice who would say they think this is a good decision.