111–120 of 246 posts
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This attitude from the Mozilla crew has convinced me to try switching from Chrome for a week. (I understand that these latest features aren't yet available in the normal releases)
I switched completely to Firefox on my work computer. Don't miss Chrome at all.
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Since you work on ads, may I ask why you support this? Won't this make most of your features ineffective?
In principle advertising is fine. Telling people that a product exists is useful. "Do you need a hat shaped exactly like a golf ball? At Dave's Golf Ball Hats we sell six sizes!". Targeting this advert to most likely be seen by people who actually had been thinking of buying a hat shaped like sporting equipment is still a good idea too. But an advert that steals from you, or harms you is neither of those things. Goog…
For example, suppose depressed people are more likely to buy expensive impulse item X. Person A is depressed. Lets show them ads for item X!
That would be a nicely profitable strategy that could emerge organically out of a sophisticated ML ad targeting model, something like... AdWords.
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> this setting causes problems with google captcha - the number of challenges that you will need to solve will drastically increase No kidding. I'm talking about ~30-40 clicks (1 click per task in the captcha grid)
not to mention when google puts you in captcha-hell-ban. often, after a few difficult ones, I realize I get stuck into the same 20 challenges. over and over. no matter if I get them rigth or not. We do run all browser in the office with figerprint protection on and run non-exit-tor-nodes in all offices. But those are hardly excuses. The hell bans happens more often on firefox for android, but I guess that is what you…
All browsers have to do is share a single advertiser ID and have it reset by the user whenever they want. No more cookies, pixel syncs, or fingerprinting and all the related countermeasures.
This is the exact mechanism used by mobile apps right now so it's already well-tested and proven to work.
> In the coming months, we will start testing these protections with small groups of users and will continue to work with Disconnect to improve and expand the set of domains blocked by Firefox. We plan to enable these protections by default for all Firefox users in a future release. While lots of people here already have uMatrix or other blockers running, blocking fingerprinting and cryptomining domains by default wo…
Since you work on ads, may I ask why you support this? Won't this make most of your features ineffective?
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You already can donate to Mozilla: https://donate.mozilla.org
I'd rather buy a browser as a company's primary product, not donate to Mozilla which makes a browser and does many other things, many of which I disagree with and would rather not fund.
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In principle advertising is fine. Telling people that a product exists is useful. "Do you need a hat shaped exactly like a golf ball? At Dave's Golf Ball Hats we sell six sizes!". Targeting this advert to most likely be seen by people who actually had been thinking of buying a hat shaped like sporting equipment is still a good idea too. But an advert that steals from you, or harms you is neither of those things. Goog…
> Targeting this advert to most likely be seen by people who actually had been thinking of buying a hat shaped like sporting equipment is still a good idea too. Not if that targeting is done using data gathered about me without my consent -- as it almost universally is. Targeting based on context (what sort of website the ad is on, for instance), is fine.
Everything went fine, until I noticed WhatsApp web becomes unusable, because it does not generate the initial QR code for establishing the session (to be fair, it flickers, which seems worse, as it smells of an active countermeasure on WhatsApp/Facebook part).
While I did I not have yet the time do dig deep into the specific technical reason WhatsApp may have to expose such a maddening behavior, I am inclined to think that this is more a policy choice.
If so, it's troublesome. We collectively as users arrived to the point of willingly give up the keys of our online communication to a few megacompanies. It's their infrastructure and their product, so they are in power of steering it in whatever direction it wants.
I see this as something that will increasingly become a political problem. As tech versed person, I see the responsibility for not doing enough about it.
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> Targeting this advert to most likely be seen by people who actually had been thinking of buying a hat shaped like sporting equipment is still a good idea too. Not if that targeting is done using data gathered about me without my consent -- as it almost universally is. Targeting based on context (what sort of website the ad is on, for instance), is fine.
I don't understand this new position (that GDPR follows) that consent is required for information to be gathered on someone. If someone sees me wearing a blue shirt and writes in their notebook that I wore a blue shirt then I don't feel like I have some inherent right to coerce them to erase it or prevent them from selling that information to Blue Shirt Emporium.
i (and many others) believe that surveillance is like this. the effort that it takes to do what your describing does not scale, and cannot be used to implement dragnet surveillance and data collection (unless it's a police state and you have a lot of notetakers). lots of people (myself and many others) think dragnet surveillance (whether by private entities or governments) is a thing to be avoided (because it creates really bad power asymmetries, which i think are inherently a bad thing).
also, i don't think that large companies should be granted the same rights as individuals. just because a person can do a thing on their own doesn't mean that a large entity should be able to do something similar in spirit at thousands or millions of times the scale.
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In principle advertising is fine. Telling people that a product exists is useful. "Do you need a hat shaped exactly like a golf ball? At Dave's Golf Ball Hats we sell six sizes!". Targeting this advert to most likely be seen by people who actually had been thinking of buying a hat shaped like sporting equipment is still a good idea too. But an advert that steals from you, or harms you is neither of those things. Goog…
Untargeted advertising is very often more egregious than merely telling people a product exists. Traditional pre-digital advertising runs the gamete from "Come to me and I'll fix your car" to "You are ugly and unpopular, but you can fix that by drinking our caramel colored sugar water." Advertising that tries to induce then exploit self esteem issues is a plague.