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For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

heise.de

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Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we know why they blocked about:config on mobile? It doesn't make any sense at all...

It worked for me, no issues. I am on version 128.0 (Build #2016030615)

I had to go through some Gecko thing first like others mentioned, quite odd. Supposedly the setting to adjust is in there too, but I have no idea what applies here

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#232
One of the few things about Firefox that made me attempt to tolerate its repeatedly slow, shitty performance and tendency to slow my whole device down, was the privacy angle. With that gone, why bother? Might as well use Chrome. At least it's light and fairly quick.

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#233
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legal: “it’s forbidden to target ads at specific users” Done.

My perfect world would have a law against advertising in general. If someone's paying you to say something, it's a conflict of interest and illegal. Hopefully, the vacuum of people needing to know things would result in better independent Product reviews. And the vacuum of not spending 30% of your company budget on advertising would hopefully lead to sinking prices and people being more willing to spend on things tha…

> If someone's paying you to say something, it's a conflict of interest and illegal.

That already misses a huge problem though, I don't pay Mozilla for Firefox and I don't pay most online sites and services that gobble up my data and sell it off.

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#234
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What isn’t clear, in retrospect or otherwise, is why companies/apps/services need to keep learning this lesson. They are trying to find a funding model that makes them independent from Google. - Building a fast, privacy-oriented browser that keeps up with web standards and fixes security bugs takes people, organisation and therefore money. Yes, much more than that CEO salary. - No one wants to buy for a browser. -…

> How should browser development be funded? One of the most common Mozilla complaints I see on the web is that you cannot fund Firefox development directly. People want to give money to it, but cannot. Which makes sense, I guess. Anecdotally, Mozilla is by far the company I know with the most vocal users that get completely ignored.

Come now, let us be realistic, no one and nothing funds browser development other than advertisement:

https://ladybird.org/#sponsors

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Full liability for secondary harms caused by the leak of data that wasn’t directly required to provide a service to those same end users. Selling of data to third parties doesn’t transfer this liability but expands it to include any leaks or misuse coming from the entities the data is sold to. No statute of limitations. So if company X sells data to company Y and then Y sells to company Z then company X has full liab…

We don't need more laws to solve this if your concern is a more harsh punishment for data leaks, we need to remove existing laws that limit the damages a company can be liable for and we need consumers that care enough to sue when they are harmed.

That is what I am saying above. Full liability for the data stored and shared with others. Transitive liability would need to be a new law though as I don’t believe that currently exists.

EDIT: forgot to mention consumers don’t need to care much for this to be effective. If there are damages to be had law firms are incentivized to file class action lawsuits and recruit affected customers. So, there is an incentivized actor within this framework to do the leg work to get a big payday.

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#236

Enough of this waiting for virtuous entities to address legitimate concerns of the public. The "ad industry" is a cancer and we need legal protection against this "industry". The solution is political not technical and definitely can not be left to "the market". Haven't you had enough?

[flagged]

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#237
post #185

I wonder why they claim they need this... Tor seems to be doing fine as an organization without collecting user data? Why maintaining Firefox is much more expensive? I guess the codebase for Firefox is much larger and in the end Tor is a fork of Firefox, right? So maybe they do need much more resources? Not to say I'm not disappointed with Mozilla once again.

Tor is (was?) heavily subsidised by secret services in a.o. the US. > likewise, agencies within the U.S. government variously fund Tor (the U.S. State Department, the National Science Foundation, and – through the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which itself partially funded Tor until October 2012 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_%28network%29?wprov=sfla1

While it has had funding from some sources we don’t necessarily trust, it’s still entirely open source and the code has been combed through repeatedly.

When it comes to privacy apps, I’d place significantly more trust in something like that than literally anything closed source or unscrutinized to that degree.

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#238
post #17

The CTO of Mozilla just posted on /r/firefox about this: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_abo...

What is really concerning (and enlightening) is that it is the CTO that's posting, and not the CEO. It shows that the topic is merely now considered as a technical point, rather than a principal-based one.

The Mozilla CEO would be very unlikely to receive a positive reception.

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#239

So how do we turn it off? Found it. Go to settings, type privacy into the search box. The last item under "Firefox Data Collection and Use" is a check box labelled "Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement". It was already unchecked on mine when I looked just now.

Interestingly the option has a link to an explanation on how it works. Which was handy as I couldn't get past the German cookie dialogue on the original article.

I guess the question is whether the aggregation services can be persuaded by clever attribute manipulation to give the ad site a near unique report for a user across many sites.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attr...>

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-ppm-dap>

https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experime...>

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#240

Enough of this waiting for virtuous entities to address legitimate concerns of the public. The "ad industry" is a cancer and we need legal protection against this "industry". The solution is political not technical and definitely can not be left to "the market". Haven't you had enough?

[flagged]

€5? Meta alone generates over that in ARPU in the EU, and 3× that in the US. And that’s for everyone, not just the salaried subset.
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