Technology

So I read a bit of Mozilla’s documentation about this feature. It sounds like they’re trying to replace the current practices with something safer. Honestly, my first thought is that this is a good thing for two reasons.

• It’s an attempt to replace cross site tracking methods, which are terrible
• Those of us that fight against ads, tracking, etc. can simple use typical methods to block the api. Methods that were already using (I think)

If both of these are true, then it could be a net positive for the world. Please tell me if I’m wrong!

Mozilla has added special software co-authored by Meta and built for the advertising industry

No thanks, I’ll pass

Look, everything is going to disappoint us. Everything runs off a profit motive, and it turns out profit is immoral.

To disable:

user_pref("dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled", false);

From the article, quoting a Firefox dev explaining the decision:

@McCovican @jonny @mathew @RenewedRebecca Opt-in is only meaningful if users can make an informed decision. I think explaining a system like PPA would be a difficult task. And most users complain a lot about these types of interruption.

In my opinion an easily discoverable opt-out option + blog posts and such were the right decision.

puts on They Live glasses

@McCovican @jonny @mathew @RenewedRebecca If we had made it opt in, then not a single human being on the planet would have enabled it, and we didn’t want that

Explaination from the article:

The way it works is that individual browsers report their behavior to a data aggregation server (operated by Mozilla), then that server reports the aggregated data to an advertiser's server. The "advertising network" only receives aggregated data with differential privacy, but the aggregation server still knows the behavior of individual browsers!

Sad to see Mozilla being managed into the ground, betraying their principles and selling their users.

So all browsers except some forks of Firefox are cooked now/soon?

So is it safe to assume that alternate builds of Firefox (Pale Moon et al) will be probably removing that "feature" ?

Mozilla pays its CEOs millions and millions of dollars. They exist to get funding from Chrome to look like there is competition in the industry.

Default Firefox is becoming more and more unusable. I hope distros will start switching to something like Librewolf as the default browser in the future or heavily (and visibly) change the default Firefox config themselves.

Should I now ditch Firefox for Librewolf?

Edit: I just did that

Honest question, why does the fediverse like firefox so much? This is not a common opinion to have on the internet, but everyone here and on mastodon seems to have it.

Oh wow, that needs to be off by default like yesterday. 💀

Anyone see the option to turn it off on Android phones?

Is there a list anywhere of this and other settings and features that could/should certainly be changed to better Firefox privacy?

Other than that I’m not sure I’m really going to jump ship. I think I’m getting too old for the “clunkiness” that comes with trying to use third party/self hosted alternatives to replace features that ultimately break the privacy angle, or to add them to barebones privacy focused browsers. Containers and profile/bookmark syncing, for example. But if there’s a list of switches I can flip to turn off the most egregious things, that would be good for today.