They haven’t added ad tracking. That’s a fake news. You should read up on how it actually works.
I’ve read up on how it works and it says it’s tracking how well or badly ads perform when shown to me. That’s tracking ads, otherwise called ad tracking.
What now?
It’s not tracking you. It’s not the same.
It’s tracking how well ads perform without tracking individual users. Tracking ads isn’t the problem. Tracking users is the problem. Before this the only way to track ad performance was by tracking users. This is a way to track ad performance without tracking users.
Tracking ads is also a problem, just a different one. The whole point of ads is to manipulate your behavior. There’s plenty of reason to not want to make that more effective
I still don’t want advertisers to know if their ads were effective on me
Here’s the page about it:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution?as=u&utm_source=inproduct
Read that instead of someones rant about it, which imo seems a bit obtuse.
This sounds fine, I’ve no problem emitting telemetry as long as it is 100% anonymous and can’t be traced to individuals
Same, although I have lingering paranoia that any data recorded by this might be traced back to me by making inferences when combined with other data; however, unlike the OOP, I will say I don’t really know what I’m talking about.
Well I do have a problem with that. Since we don’t see eye to eye, dont you agree then that it should have been opt in instead of a hidden opt out?
I do agree with that :)
Let’s be honest, opt in telemetry features will collect so little data they might es well not exist.
Considering that ot is supposed to reduce user tracking by tracking ads directly, it’s a net gain for everyone.
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No lol, I just didn’t notice and also didn’t expect it to be there. :|
There are people that use Firefox who also get served ads?
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What’s the behavior before this option was added? Would websites track you or not?
They definitely didn’t just stop tracking you because this option exists.
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I’m currently on 115.12.0esr and the feature is absent.
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So… finally Mozilla has slowly but surely going into the dark side huh…
I’m not surprised anymore, they even had telemetry code inside android apps from waaay back then (although seems for debugging purpose)In the end I’m not justify all company bc they need money for survive & exist, although i don’t like the way they do it
This isn’t ad tracking though. Do you even know how this works?
Mull or Fennic although Fennic needs a lot of settings changed for privacy
Mozilla has been bad actors since at least 2017, they implemented a piece of malware called Cliqz on a small number of German user’s installs that recommends various services based on browser history (aka tracking and advertising); so I’d hardly call this a new development, or Mozilla “just now” falling to the dark side (and that’s not even mentioning pocket and DoH to cloudflare, which are still enabled by default).
This almost sounds like a hoax. But assuming it’s true… Install LibreWolf. It’s Firefox without the infuriating Mozilla stupid.
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/p1m2bc/who_are_adjust_the_mobile_marketing_vendor_used/
Whatever it is, it’s been around for at least 3 years.
weirdly if you search “website advertising preferences” in the firefox setting search bar nothing comes up, you have to manually scroll to find it
For everyone trying to find the setting— On my android phone, there’s a setting called “data collection”. Mine were already all off, so idk who it affects
You can disable this “feature”:
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Visit about:config
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Set “dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled” to false
if you just uncheck the button. you don’t need to Visit about:config
Is this “feature” enabled mobile yet?
Sadly, Firefox mobile got rid of about:config, and I can’t find any relevant options in the regular settings.
Yeah I couldn’t find it either. Thanks for your help!
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WTF… i thought this was just click bait but went to check on my phone as i am not at my PC right now
I’m using mull fork of Firefox which doesn’t even have these settings, the tracking features are completely removed from the browser.
This browser still makes lots of unsolicited connections to Firefox on each launch. Regardless of the settings you’ll choose. There are no single good browser on Android.
I mostly see telemetry requests getting blocked in my firewall. Is there anything else I’ve missed?
I’m on 128 on my phone. I just checked and both of those are disabled for me.
Same
double same
Triple same.
Idk what 128 is on a phone, but my galaxy s21 had everything still off. Guess I’ll have to keep an eye on it
build number (version) of Firefox, which is the software in question.
“Galaxy S21” is the model name for a physical Samsung phone, which isn’t relevant to the topic.
Oh, heard that. I’m on 128 on my phone too and they were all disabled
I’m using Mull.
Just checked mine and it’s all disabled
Use Mull
It was on for me too, wtf…
Mine was off, just checked.
These are old options. I checked these off long ago.
Here’s the information about it. It’s anonymous and It can be turned off https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution?as=u&utm_source=inproduct
That somehow males it better?
Yes. The problem with cookies was that they could be used to track and identify you. If this can’t do that, then what’s the issue?
The issue is that I already knew about cookies. I don’t want my browser to phone home (or anywhere else) without my consent.
Most data can be de-anonymized with some clever tricks. I don’t know about Mozilla but the other’s definitely try to keep it just anonymous engough to later be correlated with the rest of your profile.
Also, it might be annonymized for this dataset, by adding more ‘annonymized’ datasets stuff can be correlated
Anonymous data collection at scale is a myth.
Anonymous data collection on me when assembled will say that I’m a 40-49yo unmarried college-educated male working in one area in a certain industry and living in another area.
Only one person meets all those criteria, and it’s me.
The problem is supporting ad networks.
Mozilla has to generate enough revenue to continue developing their products somehow. It would be nice if donations were enough to cover those development costs but that simply isn’t the case. Because of this the ad networks are a necessary “evil”.
Supporting ad networks is not a ‘necessary’ evil. There are many not-for-profit organisations that do not use ads for revenue raising.
What would you suggest then? They’ve been unable to sustain themselves via donations alone.
Fire their ceo that they’re paying 6 million a year
When writing my previous post I had started writing a list of suggested strategies; but I changed my mind about posting that. I’m not a member of Mozilla. I don’t know what particular challenges they face, and my expertise are not in not-for-profit fundraising. So although I do have ideas, I don’t really want to get into a trap of trying to defend my half-arse ideas against people picking them apart. It’s beside the point. The point is just that it is achievable, as evidenced by other organisations achieving it.
I will say though that they could at least just mention on the Firefox ‘successful update’ page that Firefox is supported by donations, and give a link. A lot of people really like Firefox; and I think that if Firefox asked for donations, they would get more donations.
The setting from the original post is for sites in general, it’s not specifically about Mozilla sites. I’m not sure how having this option relates to their revenue, unless Google put it in their search contract with them?
Edit: Wait, I see people mentioning Mozilla acquired an ad company?
Yes. Yes, they did.
Jesus.
As someone who works on data anonymization, I never trust anonymization.
It needs to be opt-in to be acceptable. Opt-out is not acceptable.
There is no “anonymous” data. All telemetry should ALWAYS be opt-in, not opt-out. Otherwise all the words about privacy browser are garbage lies. And they are. Mozilla always lies to its users.
- Main def of open source Ladybird browser not liking homosexuals or whatever:
Community: Boo!
- Mozilla acquiring an ad tech company and implementing it now:
Community: well, whatever.
I sense some mental dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance? Not supporting bigotry is wholly unrelated to this issue. Also who calls gay people homosexuals? Just say gays like a normal person ffs
I would call it a vocal minority
Lol ladybird browser Dev is a homophobe? Could you send some evidence, I want to see this joke. Also, yeah, that’s really funny that people are ready to attack anybody with wrong political opinion, but when anybody is attacking them with ads/tracking/MITM they’ll find a thousand excuses for that fucked up behavior. Evils should be treated equally – mitigated and hated. There is no excuse for a single ad/tracker a person haven’t asked for. Same as there is no excuse to hate gays
if by “community” you mean the majority of users… I think you are backwards in both of those. Most don’t care about what Andreas did, and most firefox users are outraged at this.
Here’s a take by a Mozilla employee :
- Mozilla has been ad funded since 2005
- Browser development is not sustainable by just donations
- Transparency is most important
« Ad funded » ? Don’t they mean « Google funded » ?
Firefox has never tried to run on donations though.
You’re actually wrong. They did when they started.
I know because I donated
The funny thing is that the people who complain most about stuff like this, tend to be the people who contribute the least.
If you don’t like them making money to support development, you’re more than welcome to work full time on developing it for free
You’re not supporting development, you’re supporting a rich guy getting richer:
Interesting to note that the Mozilla CEO earned nearly as much ($5.6 M) as Mozilla received in donations ($7 M).
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-investigating-the-bizarre-finances-of-mozilla
Non-profits of the scale that Mozilla is need good talent to continue to exist. Good talent needs to be paid close to market rates to work for non-profits, and retaining good talent requires even better pay and benefits than just what will get good talent in the door
No matter how much or how little the talent at a nonprofit is paid people will go “why are they paying the CEO a $1 million dollar salary? They could hire 6-8 developers for that much!” “Why are they paying developers 100k/year? Can’t they accept 80k for the privilege of working for such an important bastion of the open internet?”
15 million a year is a lot but it’s also 1/3 the median CEO pay rate. They have to pay the CEO at least semi-competitively to retain them
Rich guy?
Presumably that is about Mitchell Baker… A woman… who was there since the beginning when the company was failing…
The new CEO is also a woman and a temp CEO, who I’m guessing will again be replaced by an existing employee. Which guy are you referring to?
What browser projects are you assisting with or donating to?
Are you assisting with any open source projects at all?
The biggest problem with the oss community is that as a developer, you need to accept always that you’ll get treated like absolute dirt by the community.
One of my projects went FrontPage on many major Linux sites, and I ended up dropping it because I got tired of the abuse.
You’ll get plenty of people contributing nothing to your project or competing ones, but they’ll tell you the 50 different ways you suck
I donated back when Firefox was in beta. They were a dying company back then.
Are you saying open source developers shouldn’t be rewarded at all?
I could be mistaken, but I’m pretty sure all donations go to The Mozilla Foundation. I believe the foundation is the decision-making power for the corporation.
Either way, yes, Mozilla sold their soul to Google (specifically, giving preference to Google Search) in exchange for sustainability (read: survival). Rather difficult to compete in a market where Google and Apple collectively hold upwards of 85% market share for something they provide “free.”
Donations are a tiny fraction of Mozilla’s income. Firefox and related projects are their money earners for their actually charitable projects, pulling in at least half a billion or so a year.
Not saying that the CEO pay is adequate or something, but your take is literally ignoring the article you yourself quoted.
Ah interesting. I didn’t know. I started using Firefox as a kid around version 2.
I totally want Firefox to make money, but I wonder if donations couldn’t be a significant part of that pie today. It seems a lot more people would prefer to donate to Firefox than Mozilla.
Yeah. Maybe I’m just old (I’m 40).
I would be happy to donate. But, the reality is… donations don’t work in my experience. One of my projects went FrontPage on all the major tech sites (and even was mentioned in Linux format magazine).
I got $300 in donations.
$250 was from a person I knew…
Backend projects often get screwed more, and I guess you probably need to hope you get supported by companies like Redhat ultimately. This may be why in my case. But backend projects always have people dissing them (frontend projects just need to look good and markety)
I think what’s more important is that it’s open source to be honest. We’re actually lucky we still have Mozilla honestly.
In Mozilla browser days (after Netscape), id imagine it would have been a struggle to get a good pay. The people still there I suspect took a massive risk, and could have moved to lots of other companies like Google instead quite easily
I think they deserve to get rewarded…
I feel like Mozilla could have been what NextCloud is today. Totally free, open source, and offering a vast offering of office apps, with paid hosted versions. It could be all neatly integrated into Firefox, and you would pay a premium to use them without self hosting. The only thing they did was create Firefox VPN, and the only reason most people use VPNs is because of scammy marketing.
Yes… Similarly, there are lots of browsers that failed too… KHTML for instance is what Chrome and safari was based off…
They have a huge number of projects they tried… Including their own mobile phone OS which they were actively shipping (it’s a pity it didn’t survive, would have been nice to have a 3rd OS)
It’s really a risk / time payoff here. The reality is, when you see projects like this, there are 20 more which fail.
When you have limited resources, things like Firefox VPN actually make sense, because its low risk (there’s a lot of competitors, but its fast to implement).
An office suite takes a huge amount of resources, and is a lot of work.
VPN’s do have their uses. But, I agree… 99% of it is scum marketing
Totally free, open source, and offering a vast offering of office apps, with paid hosted versions.
When Mozilla was founded the idea of hosted webapps didn’t exist. Quite the frankly web standards didn’t yet exist to allow such a thing to exist. Those were the days when you’d use Flash, Shockwave or Silverlight just to view media content on the web.
But I do agree, they could be investing right now into feature rich hosted services, but they’ve only half-assed any paid services they’ve tried to integrate and then dropped them because they couldn’t get enough users to make it worth continuing the effort
Exactly because Mozilla was around to see the Internet grow and mature they should have been fit to create such a suite.
The funny thing is that the people who complain most about stuff like this, tend to be the people who contribute the least.
Why would I donate to them if they are going to advertise at me either way?
Yeah. I want to donate directly towards the development of FF, but I can’t. I know several other people who of a similar disposition.
Browser development might not be sustainable with user donations, but it sure as hell is sustainable when you get 400 million bucks by Google every year.
Mozilla has been ad funded since 2005
It was funded through a deal with an ad company. It did not become an ad company itself until much more recently. jwz had a succinct and memorable response to the the absurd idea that really it’s been ad-funded all along and that this makes things okay:
You are just another of those so-predictable people saying, “The animal shelter has always had a kitten-meat deli, why are you surprised?”
Yes, Mozilla started making absolutely horrific funding and management decisions many years ago. Today, they have taken this subtext and turned it into the actual text.
That’s certainly a quote that will stick with me.
