… I don’t know of this is satire or not.
- There is now a feature labeled “Privacy-preserving ad measurement” near the bottom of your Firefox Privacy settings. I recommend turning it off, or switching to a more privacy-conscious browser such as Google Chrome.
Definitely satire, the context from earlier:
- Firefox is worse than Chrome in their implementation of ad snitching, because Chrome enables it only after user consent.
I mean, have you met people? They could be completely serious when posting that lol.
I mean, have you met people?
I mean… I try not to
Same same. Also for like the same reason.
How is that obviously satire?
[edit: To be clear, I assume the part that OP is not sure if it’s satire or not is “or switching to a more privacy-conscious browser such as Google Chrome.”] The emphasis in
Firefox is worse than Chrome
is in the original. To me that clearly implies that they are of the opinion that in general Google & Chrome are worse on privacy than Mozilla & Firefox. The comment at the end is just tongue in cheek snark alluding to the fact that in this particular case google did better for privacy in Chrome than Mozilla in Firefox.
or switching to a more privacy-conscious browser such as Google Chrome.
The fact that both me and you are questioning whether this is satire or not worries me greatly.
The updates don’t sound like satire. Some of this is crazypantsrants
Absolute clown shoes
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
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.
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.
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
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.”
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?
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.
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
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?
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 (mostly due to the half-assed effort they put in to start with)
Exactly because Mozilla was around to see the Internet grow and mature they should have been fit to create such a suite.
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.
« Ad funded » ? Don’t they mean « Google funded » ?
Oh shit. Now that I have checked, it was turned on by default on mine too.
What’s wrong with you mozilla ?? Firefox was supposed to be the alternative
It has not been the alternative for a while now IMO. I have been using LibreWolf.
They have gone corrupt, they’re full-on techbros now
You can disable this “feature”:
-
Visit about:config
-
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!
-
“It’s okay, we can enshitify a little.” - the board at Mozilla probably.
Just a taste. We can stop at any time.
just the tip. We’ll just soak the ad tracking for a bit.
It’s better to apologize than to ask permission, right babe? Right!?
“You dimwitted plebs are too stupid to meaningfully opt-in, so we made it opt-out.”
- Mozilla developer
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
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.
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That somehow makes it better?
Edit typo
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 problem is supporting ad networks.
Edit: /s because apparently it wasn’t obvious. Anonymous is obviously better.
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”.
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.
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.
Most data can be de-anonymized with some clever tricks. I don’t know about Mozilla but the others definitely try to keep it just anonymous enough to later be correlated with the rest of your profile.
Edit: typos
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 issue is that I already knew about cookies. I don’t want my browser to phone home (or anywhere else) without my consent.
Cookies are a non-issue. They store data only locally and can be edited and removed at will. With third party isolation on by default there’s really no reason to worry about them much anymore. And if you do just install cookie auto-delete to clean things up.
This variant is definitely worse because the data is no longer just local.
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That’s part 2
librewolf ftw
I keep hearing Tor is the thing now.
and ungoogled-chromium for the chrome fans 👍
Here’s the page about it:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution
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
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?
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.
I do agree with that :)
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.
Did you ironically preserve the utm_source parameter?
No lol, I just didn’t notice and also didn’t expect it to be there. :|
Noice
I guess librewolf is the future
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No telemetry though which is the big one
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I mean, it doesn’t look like it’s personally identifiable at all, just aggregate.
IMO, that’s splitting a hair.
For a browser that supposedly respects user privacy, the fact that this is opt-out rather than opt-in really leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I’m going to reconsider my monthly recurring donation to Mozilla, especially if they keep this up.
Adjust isn’t google adservices. The difference is staggering, actually, and way more than a hair’s split on identifying information not being included.
I can’t help but see it as the foot in the door.
I understand that Mozilla needs money, but I can’t make everyone who uses Firefox commit to donating money to keep them from having to do things like this to stay afloat. But them going down this path makes me not want to donate at all.
I hate to break it to you but you aren’t a significant source of income for Mozilla. You are the product not the customer.
I never said I was, just that I wanted to support the browser that respects my privacy, and this move is making me reconsider it.
As long as it’s open source someone will be able to find a way to turn it off, either by an addon or by patching and compiling the source code.
Is it tracking you or tracking ads? If it was the latter and it is made public, that is information I’m sure we would all be interested in
Seems to be the latter.
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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 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 on 128 on my phone and it was on for me, I definitely didn’t turn those on myself. wtf.
Just checked mine and it’s all disabled
These are old options. I checked these off long ago.
I’m using Mull.
I’m using mull fork of Firefox which doesn’t even have these settings, the tracking features are completely removed from the browser.
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I mostly see telemetry requests getting blocked in my firewall. Is there anything else I’ve missed?
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It was on for me too, wtf…
Mine was off, just checked.
Use Mull
I know, that’s awful. I also turn it off. But that’s actually different than the new feature mentioned in this post. This has existed for years already (I think)
Here’s the info about it: https://mzl.la/3AcmG8q
I see this as them giving companies a more privacy-preserving alternative to tracking. And just another privacy setting to opt out for us.
Instead of a reactive social media post, here’s how it works.
The only real alternative to this conflict of interest between companies and customers is an independent browser.
A more privacy-preserving alternative to tracking does not sound privacy-preserving to me.
it’s like a drizzle is a dryer alternative to a thunderstorm
surely I’d prefer none, but if I had to choose…
Go to the librewolf shop and walk out in a rain coat.
Moot point. Librewolf won’t exist without Firefox.
What are you talking about? No one called the existence of Firefox into question.
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
This almost sounds like a hoax. But assuming it’s true… Install LibreWolf. It’s Firefox without the infuriating Mozilla stupid.