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"Privacy-Preserving" Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us yet Again

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Re: "Privacy-Preserving" Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us yet Again

#21

Post by sabbaticaldev »

mogoh wrote: post #19
1GZ0 wrote: post #15

Legitimate question here: Is there a legit reason to Firefox over Chrome at this point? I mean, its not performance, its not convenience, and now its not even privacy. At this rate, it looks like Firefox is going to end up just like Chrome, but slower and less fully featured.

Manifest V2/V3 is a reason to still use Firefox. There are still a lot of differences between the two browsers and a monoculture is still bad. How ever I see the pull towards Chromium.

without PWA and a terrible service worker support, firefox holds the web behind.

Re: "Privacy-Preserving" Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us yet Again

#22

Post by shaan7 »

1GZ0 wrote: post #15

Legitimate question here: Is there a legit reason to Firefox over Chrome at this point? I mean, its not performance, its not convenience, and now its not even privacy. At this rate, it looks like Firefox is going to end up just like Chrome, but slower and less fully featured.

I use Firefox simply because the address bar UX is better. It prioritizes my history over search results, I almost never have more than 3-5 tabs open, so I rely heavily on typing a keyword in the address bar to go to a page in my history. Another thing I rely a lot is Multi-Account containers, which makes it very to keep aspects of life separated.

This ad stuff is very concerning, though :(

Re: "Privacy-Preserving" Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us yet Again

#23

Post by imajoredinecon »

This article makes a couple highly misleading claims about the privacy properties of the feature and its value - would suggest reading the docs to see how it actually works then forming an opinion

In particular saying you’re sending your activity to Mozilla is not accurate: you’re sending the output of a postcomputation step that makes it cryptographically infeasible for Mozilla to see your activity.

Re: "Privacy-Preserving" Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us yet Again

#24

Post by imajoredinecon »

anticensor wrote: post #9
greatgib wrote: post #4

So sad to see that the Mozilla corporation completely lost its way. I'm wondering if they are really surprised to have almost lost all of their market share when they go against their core values so easily... The tldr that says it all: One Mozilla developer claimed that explaining PPA would be too challenging, so they had to opt users in by default. ... The way it works is that individual browsers report their behavi…

Yeah, why isn't the DP applied at the client side? It's not like a simple Gaussian shuffler is so computationally expensive.

The article’s description of the feature is very inaccurate. The way it works is using secure two-party computation to aggregate data and apply DP server-side without Mozilla or the advertiser being able to see pre-aggregation data.

This has much better utility than applying DP client-side but still has similar privacy guarantees

Re: "Privacy-Preserving" Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us yet Again

#25

Post by panja »

brador wrote: post #12
pleasecalllater wrote: post #10

I hope unchecking the setting really disables the feature. I have hard time trusting Mozilla now... or rather I should write "again". On the other hand: there is a ticket [1] asking for container-based-extensions, so something like Grammarly (aka the keylogger) could work only inside a container. It's been there for years, nothing changes. Seems like people are not interested in this kind of privacy stuff. The good n…

For anyone wondering the Moz CEO salary is near $7 million.

Is this actually that high for comparable roles?

Re: "Privacy-Preserving" Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us yet Again

#26

Post by delichon »

imajoredinecon wrote: post #23

This article makes a couple highly misleading claims about the privacy properties of the feature and its value - would suggest reading the docs to see how it actually works then forming an opinion In particular saying you’re sending your activity to Mozilla is not accurate: you’re sending the output of a postcomputation step that makes it cryptographically infeasible for Mozilla to see your activity.

That's nice but I also care about being profiled by advertisers. I'd even be OK with an opt-in to that. But an opt-out isn't good enough.

Re: "Privacy-Preserving" Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us yet Again

#27

Post by michaelt »

panja wrote: post #25
brador wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone wondering the Moz CEO salary is near $7 million.

Is this actually that high for comparable roles?

Google's Sundar Pichai took home $226 million for managing 182,000 employees and making $305.6 billion in revenue, so $1,238 per employee and 0.07% of revenue.

Mozilla's Mitchell Baker took home $6.9 million for managing 750 employees and making $593 million in revenue, so $9,200 per employee and 1.16% of revenue.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's CEO earns $1.28M with 2000 employees and revenue of $328 million, which is $640 per employee and 0.4% of revenue. Although I can't say for sure whether that figure is full-time-equivalent employees or if they have a large number of part time staff.

So you might consider the Mozilla CEO's salary very low or very high, depending on what you mean by "comparable"

In terms of value for money - a generous salary might be justified if Mozilla is a thriving organisation that's going from strength to strength thanks to the wisdom of its leadership. But is it?

Re: "Privacy-Preserving" Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us yet Again

#28

Post by nubinetwork »

sabbaticaldev wrote: post #21
mogoh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manifest V2/V3 is a reason to still use Firefox. There are still a lot of differences between the two browsers and a monoculture is still bad. How ever I see the pull towards Chromium.

without PWA and a terrible service worker support, firefox holds the web behind.

Users don't care if their favourite websites are PWAs.

Re: "Privacy-Preserving" Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us yet Again

#29

Post by arp242 »

Firefox 128 enables "privacy-preserving" ad measurements by default - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40966312 - Jul 2024 (80 comments)

"Firefox added [ad tracking] and has already turned it on without asking you" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954535 - Jul 2024 (164 comments)

Ad-tech setting 'Privacy-Preserving Attribution' is opt-out in Firefox 128 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40952330 - Jul 2024 (185 comments)

Re: "Privacy-Preserving" Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us yet Again

#30

Post by greatgib »

imajoredinecon wrote: post #24
anticensor wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, why isn't the DP applied at the client side? It's not like a simple Gaussian shuffler is so computationally expensive.

The article’s description of the feature is very inaccurate. The way it works is using secure two-party computation to aggregate data and apply DP server-side without Mozilla or the advertiser being able to see pre-aggregation data . This has much better utility than applying DP client-side but still has similar privacy guarantees

All in all, I don't see why my own "privacy preserving" browser would snitch on me doing calls to an external server with aggregated data about my browsing history just to please advertisers...

Even if they pretend that data is "obfuscated" in some way...

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