ahal

How do you fight it? Go around using it at every opportunity and have people think you're a far right sympathiser? They'll believe that before they believe you're simply passionate about symbols.

I don't think anyone is asking you to stop blocking ads. Block away!

I think the only request defenders of PPA are making, is please don't actively prevent it from making things better for everyone else.

Huge "I think about you all the time / I don't think about you at all" vibes.

You're absolutely correct.

Some folks here just want to ban ads outright, but don't stop to think what that would mean. The one that frightens me is what happens to the already crumbling news industry when they additionally lose all advertising revenue? And don't say subscriptions, because those won't come close to cutting it. Maybe a couple outlets like the Times could survive, but all the others are going under.

It's a template to help set all the security and privacy hardening features that Firefox already ships with but are disabled by default.

Yes but they don't do any hardware anymore and have pivoted into security for enterprise phones, iot and cars.

For every energised Trump supporter you see, there's 1000 more sitting at home nodding along to their Fox broadcast. Same for any political party.. The vast vast vast majority of us aren't motivated enough to leave our homes for politics outside of election day.

Yes, all great points. But you're comparing the wrong thing. The comparison isn't PPA vs no ads. It's PPA vs being personally targeted by ad companies. It's clearly a step in the right direction.

Or I can tell advertisers to eat shit and give them nothing, like I've been doing my whole life. Has been working well so far

Now your getting it! Yes, just keep using an ad blocker and tell advertisers to fuck off! That's exactly what we can all continue doing, and this PPA stuff will have 0 impact on us. But it will improve the lives of everyone not using ad blockers.

They didn't sell your data before

Firefox has been funded by ads from the beginning, and has had sponsored tiles (aka ads) since around 2014 I think?

I personally think there's a difference between selling ads and selling your data too. I'm going to go on a limb and say you see no distinction.

This was not about "making things better for people on the Internet," it was about a few individuals enriching themselves.

Mozilla Corp is fully owned by a non profit, so there's no owners getting rich off of any excess profits.

Saying ads are here to stay so you have to accept them or die, is an absurd false dichotomy

I'd love for nothing more than for there to be a viable alternative!

Because Firefox is funded by ads, whether it's the PPA ads outlined in this post, or search referrals from Google. Default adblocking would kill the revenue stream. Maybe Firefox could continue on with volunteers and donations, but not anywhere near its current staffing level. Eventually the engine would fall further and further behind and fewer and fewer people would use it.

To clarify.. Making a browser is relatively easy and there's lots of successful projects that do so without significant revenue. But making a rendering engine is really fucking hard and requires a ton of money to maintain.

Let's be real, there's no way PPA is going to be as valuable as the data that can be gathered by state of the art ad tech. So the ad companies that adopt this will be making a compromise to do so. How is this tech making their lives easier?

Also they have no incentive to develop this tech, so why would they? It's not like Mozilla is doing work for them that they would have done anyway. If anything they're probably worried that the tech will take off and then legislation will follow to force them to use it.