… I mean, WTF. Mozilla, you had one job …
Edit:
Just to add a few remarks from the discussions below:
- As long as Firefox is sponsored by ‘we are not a monopoly’ Google, they can provide good things for users. Once advertisement becomes a real revenue stream for Mozilla, the Enshittification will start.
- For me it is crossing the line when your browser is spying on you and if ‘we’ accept it, Mozilla will walk down this path.
- This will only be an additional data point for companies spying on you, it will replace none of the existing methodologies. Learn about fingerprinting for example
- Mozilla needs to make money/find a business model, agreed. Selling you out to advertisement companies cannot be it.
- This is a very transparent attempt of Mozilla to be the man in the middle selling ads, despite the story they tell. At that point I can just use Chrome, Edge or Safari, at least Google has expertise and the money to protect my data.
- Mozilla massively acts against the interests of their little remaining user base, which is another dump move made by a leadership team earning millions while kicking out developers and makes me wonder what will be next.
… No, it does not. The ads are currently already tracking clicks and conversions, on top of a whole boatload of other personal data. This API instead provides them with just the click and conversion data, divorced from the personal data and then aggregated with all the other site visitors.
Being against this proposal basically means you trust random websites and ad companies more with your data then you do Mozilla and LetsEncrypt.
Instead of what? As I said, this is in addition to existing tracking, with some vague promise that if current tracking methods were banned or abandoned, this could be used instead. Except it’s not getting banned (Mozilla is not going to out-lobby Google) or abandoned (market forces prevent that), and why oh why would I want some alternative way for ad companies to get my data in that situation anyway? Let them die.
Now if another person is going to repeat this nonsense talking point, which you have picked up strait from Mozilla’s corporate PR, I’m going to lose my mind. Have some critical thinking skills. They are giving away your data right now and they give you nothing in return except a nonsense promise of a fairytale future.
Please I just want a browser that acts in the user’s interest only, does not work with Meta on adtech, and does not think it’s their duty to save the ad industry from itself.
Again, no, that’s not true. This API is only used by sites that opt into it, and in so doing, they are disabling the normal tracking which is far more invasive.
Sorry but where does it say they will disable “normal tracking” if they use this API?
In the entire pitch, the announcement, this clarification, and all the technical data? Read literally any of it again and you’ll see that this is the whole point of the API.
You are missing the point. websites WILL NOT STOP TRACKING YOU! Nothing in this API can do that.
Where does it say that? How would this be enforced?
It’s enforced by the websites, they opt into this API. It says that everywhere you can read about this.
I can’t find this in the announcements and stuff. Where does it say that exactly?
https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experiment
Check out the second and third paragraphs in particular.
This initial implementation is just to test the actual API, so I don’t believe sites using it will be blocking the other tracking yet, but once this API is tested and starts to see adoption, the goal is replacing tracking with this anonymized attribution.