I consider Mozilla to be a public interest group. It's understandable that Meta's involvement is seen as a red flag, but if you want it to actually happen, part of this process will involve cooperating with advertisers. In the end any proposal should be judged primarily on its merits rather than its authors.

Well of course it would have to go beyond Firefox to be effective. But if PPA can show that advertising can function without surveillance, then the business case for surveillance-based advertising goes away. This would make it easier for governments and browsers to more aggressively limit surveillance. Those who continue to use surveillance instead of or in combination with PPA would be seen as bad actors.

This.

I never read any discussion about the obvious question: Who guarantees that enabling Privacy-Preserving Ad Measurement will keep all the other tracking away from me? No one! I've never read anything at all about the thought process behind this.

As you said, with current (EU) law and regulations, it's just one more data point.

So it's worth nothing.

Because it's easier and because it makes it impossible to make a case for any other kind of tracking under laws like GDPR once this exists.

Blocking ads only works because just a small percentage of users block ads. It's a free-rider situation and someone has to pay. If everyone blocks ads then sites will either counter ad blockers or if that's not possible, implement a pay wall.

https://ladybird.org might be an option in the future

They are not subsidizing the browser, but the content you consume through the browser. Firefox is free and will always be free.

> TV, newspapers and magazines supported themselves just fine using zero tracking on the advertising they ran.

False, false, demonstrably false.

Get familiar with concepts such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_to_action_(marketing)

Any business who places an ad may simply inquire of their customers "How'd you hear about us?" and they would be able to gauge the reach of a particular placement. Furthermore, anytime a coupon is published, clipped and used at that business, they are going to know where it came from, and so there's your tracking, on paper, no electronic voodoo necessary.

Now when we get to radio and TV, the calls to action were even more immediate and measurable. The stations themselves ran promotions where hundreds, thousands clamored to phone in and be the correct-numbered caller. The advertisements ran specials and promotions and "tell 'em Joe sent ya!" type stuff. They could give a special number or they could run at a special time. The business knew exactly what ad correlated to those callers.

Infomercials are classic calls to action. You purchase time, you run the ad, and you give an hour or so window for callers to get a great deal. The calls roll into your switchboard and you correlate them. Then you buy the next round of ads based on your successes.

I guarantee that there has never, ever been a time when advertisers were unable or unwilling to collect metrics on responses to ads. Especially when marketing costs money, that investment needs to be based on facts and statistics.

> The idea that advertisers are owed any more data than that, or that the developers of web browsers need to bend to the will of the surveillance capitalists is insane.

It's a zero sum game. If others are doing it, then their advertising is more effective, the advertising cost per sale is lower, they are more competitive, and so every company is forced to do the same.

But if nobody is able to do it, then there will be no great loss for the consumer. Advertisers could argue that the inherent advertising overhead of every product is slightly higher and so consumers would have to pay higher prices. I would argue that this is a reasonable price to pay for privacy across the board, just as we all have to pay for the implementation of regulations that mandate safe products.

So we can expect advertisers to push for competitive reasons, but equally if we comprehensively resist so as not to favour competition that isn't similarly restricted, then I agree with you that there is no actual threat to commerce.

> TV ... supported [itself] just fine using zero tracking on the advertising they ran

... by hijacking our audio-visual attention with deliberately obnoxious ad content for a third of each hour of our down-time.

> newspapers and magazines supported themselves just fine using zero tracking on the advertising they ran

..., in addition to their primarily revenue stream which was the money that customers paid for a copy of the newspaper or magazine.

PPA is about attribution. It doesn't determine ad types you're seeing like Google's Topics. What it's for is having an allegedly private way to determine if you actually bought a product based on an ad you've seen. Marketeers love having that data so they can determine if their ads are effective to trigger purchases (called "conversions")

I'm not in favour of PPA by the way. I turned it off everywhere. But I just wanted to highlight this.

> So more privacy by default is bad?

Is this necessarily the case, though?

1. Does this bypass user's cookie blocking measures (e.g. PiHole, ad blockers)? If so, it's reducing those users' privacy and opting them in by default.

2. If the user was previously interacting with GDPR-compliant websites only, is this reducing their privacy? They're not given the opportunity to consent or revoke consent to this collection of their data.

3. What are the implications of a data breach of Mozilla's servers? Would this have a greater negative impact on users' privacy than a breach of a single website?

> So more privacy by default is bad?

It's not more privacy, though. It's more tracking. Just because the word "privacy" appears in the title, does not make it so.

I blame Mozilla for the way this feature is presented.

Tbh. I don't get the negatives about Firefox. I have to use Chrome for App development and have been using it a little more in the last months. I cannot see why I should prefer it over Firefox. It works well, has (or soon used to have) good extension support and is smooth, but so is Firefox. Like, I could not say one single thing that I prefer in Chrome.

And all this while I have to ignore the single biggest negative about Chrome - that it's "run" by Google.

That depends on the usage pattern. To give you a totally different way to use Firefox: I use it both on desktop (Linux) and on mobile (Android, multiple devices.) I don't ever close it. I close it to update or to reboot my computer. On desktop it's configured to restart with the previously opened tabs and windows (one per customer, each one on its virtual desktop, one for me.) I don't sync tabs because way more than half of the tabs on my desktop Firefox are related to work, some localhost, some reachable only on a VPN. Furthermore it's no business of Mozilla or anybody else to see my tabs go through their servers, E2E encryption or not. I never used any browser internal password manager because (any other considerations apart) what happens when I want to access a site from another browser? Maybe from Chrome, and I used Opera and Vivaldi as secondary browsers many years ago. I store my passwords in one of the various Keepass apps, sync from desktop to mobile with syncthing and I'm happy.

Firefox as browser-only browser is perfectly good for me. The surrounding UI is almost transparent to me, as if it did not exist.

The only point of contact between your and mine experiences are the bookmarks on mobile. I don't use them. I pin the sites I use most on the page that opens when pressing the new tab button and those are my bookmarks. Unfortunately there are only 16 possible pinned sites there but I'm not even using all of them. Most of the times I tap the URL bar, type one or two letters and Firefox autocompletes the sites I want to see. Example: I tap n and it suggests news.ycombinator.com. Faster than any bookmarks menu.

Anyway. If most users follow your workflow, Mozilla are not doing a good job. If most users follow my workflow, they are wasting a lot of engineering time in features we don't use. IMHO Firefox users are mostly power users so I think there are at least ten different workflows competing for the top spot and whatever Mozilla does people will be mostly upset. It's not an easy place to be.

That shitty search bar behavior is extremely annoying to me as well. Luckily it can still be disabled in about:config (the setting is called browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.improvesearch.handoffToAwesomebar or similar). “Awesome” bar is not that awesome.

> a false narrative not backed by their actual communication about the feature

You're correct: Mozilla didn't try to hide this. But they didn't try to talk about it either. This isn't an obscure about:config setting; it's a new revenue source [1].

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-anonym-raising-t...

Then where is the setting in the normal privacy preferences to turn it off?

Instead it's been sneaked in behind a magic about:config URL and dialogue box saying:

> Proceed with Caution

> Changing advanced configuration preferences can impact Firefox performance or security.

At the very least that is designed to discourage you from opting out.

It was opt-out without any warning in the browser for users.

They sneaked it in.

It's that simple.

No notification on upgrade for an opt-out feature is sneaking in ...

I didn't get a pop up during an upgrade.

Yeah Google is the world's largest ad company, and Apple is (among other things) an ad company, and Mozilla just recently acquired an ad tracking/analytics company...

Both Mozilla and Apple: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/defaults-matter-dont-assume...

Thanks for the clear words. :)

But that still means both can go hand in hand! If user targeted ads and tracking is forbidden and a thing from the past, there’ll be less problems with having some proper statistical attribution.

Hint: I’m from the EU and love the intention behind GDPR.

No. But the bar for “personal data” is very low, and any data that could conceivably be linked to an individual is personal data. I’m not familiar with how this function works, but Mozilla would almost certainly have to work quite hard to avoid falling foul of this:

> ‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;

It contains data about which ads you saw or clicked on as a histogram.

GDPR defines personal data as follows: > The basic definition of personal data is any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (data subject).

This data is then aggregated using their DAP service. This means to a third party. They say it's somehow encrypted and will be fully anonymized, but I can't fully understand the implementation. There are several security considerations mentioned in the draft: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-ppm-dap/.

Doesn't matter that much, they have to ask for consent and inform the user in clear and understandable language anyway. Opt-out is a big no-no.

I wouldn't call it a "feature" but I'm not sure. Their announcement didn't mention either way (that it was everywhere or desktop only)

The settings are present in about:config though (which is difficult to access on mobile also because they hide it).

Hopefully they will abandon this plan anyway due to all the criticism. It won't do any good unless google is on board anyway.

Ladybird does look really cool but what I mean is an alternative to the Mozilla Foundation as an official steward of what should be Firefox. Basically what Mozilla was originally created to do but obviously isn't anymore.

They're just exploiting Firefox's users now. How much of what Mozilla brings in is actually going to improving Firefox? Google, the maker of the largest competitor in he browser market, has been paying off Mozilla's leadership to not compete in the browser market for like a decade now. Go research how much the c-suite was making over there at Mozilla while they were gutting the Firefox dev teams.

And now Mozilla is straight up data mining Firefox's users. They obviously don't care what the users of Firefox think anymore because no one in the community asked for any of this crap.

I don't think this needs to be explained to anyone here but modern web browsers are complicated as hell. We need viable open-source browsers but we also need a way to fund their development. Again what Mozilla was intended for. Hell it doesn't even need to be centered around Firefox specifically but we need some viable alternative to manage and fund these vital open-source projects.

Yes hopefully ladybird is the final nail in Mozillas coffin and the ladybird team shows that you don't need >$6.000.000.000 to build a proper browser.

(written in Firefox)

Nah, not using Ladybird as I don’t want to support the person building it for various reasons

First alpha in 2026…

It's promising but like 10 years behind chromium

> Google needs to fund your paycheck because no one else can be arsed.

I'd pay for it if that were an option, but it isn't.