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Make Firefox Private Again

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Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#241

Post by jqpabc123 »

kmeisthax wrote: post #229
jqpabc123 wrote: post #124

There is a form of advertising that doesn't invade your privacy and doesn't need metrics. It is called "context sensitive" advertising. This is what happens when you go to a web site dedicated to pets and you see advertising related to pets. It's reasonable to assume you have an interest in pets; otherwise, you probably wouldn't be there. No metrics required. "Personalized advertising" is what happens when you go to…

Personalized advertising has one key property that is very useful to this generation of Internet companies: it moves the ad dollars away from websites selling ads (aka "publishers") and to the networks (Google/Facebook). If you're, say, the NYT, you can sell ads, of course. But anyone who wants to buy ads on NYT can instead buy ads on other websites that only target NYT readers. Which are much cheaper. This is why ne…

Which are much cheaper.

Are they? According to whom and compared to what --- the ad networks themselves? They control everything about this game.

It's possible for someone with deep pockets to build an ad network that operates in a similar manner and offers pretty much everything Google and Facebook do minus the privacy invasion crap.

The only essential difference being how the ads are targeted. Instead of targeting individuals, the web content they are looking at would become the target --- based on the blatantly obvious "metric" that the individual must have at least some interest in what they're looking at.

This should actually be easier/cheaper to implement and maintain (no personalized metrics) and thus the ads should be less expensive. The main reason this doesn't exist in a more popular form --- Google/Facebook have sold advertisers a big load of their own marketing hype and used this to effectively monopolize the market.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#242

Post by autoexec »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #72
mrinfinitiesx wrote: post #4

wasn't aware that 'anonym' existed. I don't care if PII is stripped or not. the answer to 'helping advertisers' or anything with advertisement metrics in any fashion is always 'No.' - training things so that there's better data on how to best manipulate our psyche / give people data to psychologically manipulate us in to buying/doing things is a hard 'No.' > Asked whether Mozilla has any concerns that its user base,…

Also advertising is certainly not the reason the web is free. It was free before the insane amount of advertising. Maybe for platforms like Youtube or similar sites advertising is part of their business model. But the primary reason here is foremost people creating content. That Youtube has insane infrastructure costs is secondary and we certainly don't need Browsers to help advertising at all. If it doesn't stay opt…

> If it doesn't stay optional, Firefox should be forked. It is not a wanted feature.

This is already something they insisted on leaving enabled by default because they knew no one would opt into it. They knew full well that this isn't something people want. Mozilla is an ad-tech company now. Instead of improving firefox they spent a ton of money buying an ad company created by facebook employees. They're going to claw back a return on that investment and they're taking it from Firefox users.

They simply do not care about the privacy of Firefox users. There is zero chance that this is as far as Firefox goes in violating your privacy. Expect more anti-features, expect things you disable in about:config to re-enable themselves after updates, expect more tracking that you can't disable, expect more invasive forms of tracking, and expect your ability to block ads on firefox to get increasingly limited until it becomes impossible. It's all downhill from here.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#243

Post by PhasmaFelis »

Terretta wrote: post #163
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They can find other business models other than advertisement. The awful thing is, I'm not sure they can. Lots of sites turned to shitty ads and clickbait because it makes lots of money, but I've followed some passionate writers and journalists who decided to stick to their guns and focus on quality content with a reasonable subscription price. I don't follow any of them anymore, because they all either want out of…

You're arguing that speech should earn a living, which sounds like asserting everyone has the right to patronage. Just as most musicians or artists have to have a day job, so do most authors when they start. That's been true even for "political" speech: for about as long as people have had things to say, forms of self-subsidized pamphleteering have existed. In the 1990s, hobbyists were most of the web, enough to be a…

> You're arguing that speech should earn a living

I'm saying it sucks that the majority of periodical writing has succumbed to race-to-the-bottom clickbait and adflooding.

Newspapers and magazines from three decades ago certainly weren't perfect, but on average they were a whole lot better than modern news sites, and I don't see how we can ever get back to that situation. I don't know what the solution is, but I can see a problem when it's punching me in the face.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#244

Post by autoexec »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #120
nulbyte wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you think that the video content is going to be stored and served if not through paid infrastructure? Secondary doesn't mean nonexistent, it comes after the primary thing, content creation. When the Internet was younger, people willingly paid for privilege of sharing content. Creation was the primary motivation; costs were a secondary concern. I think it resulted in more and better communities than today, wh…

> When the Internet was younger, people willingly paid for privilege of sharing content This silences a large number of people and communities who can’t afford that privilege. Not saying that’s inherently bad. But it’s worth weighing in the moral calculus.

Honestly, when the internet was younger the costs to host content were basically zero. Anyone could run a web server on their own PC and run a website for zero costs. Many ISPs offered shell accounts and provided basic webhosting at no additional cost. These could be scaled up as needed, but everybody with a modem and an ISP had the opportunity to take part in sharing content on the internet.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#245

Post by michael9423 »

eitland wrote: post #71
Yodel0914 wrote: post #33

I recently switched to LibreWolf[0] and, after tweaking a few settings that were more zealous that I'd like, it has been just as good as vanilla FF. 0: https://librewolf.net/

Have used it as my secondary browser (~everything that doesn't need login: documentation, news, etc) for a couple of years now and it is great. Also always looking for someone to create a paid version of Firefox that: - stays up to date with development of FF - turns off all the stupid ideas - gradually re-implement the most important parts that certain old extensions dependend on: scrapbook, scheduled website update…

Librewolf does #1 and #2 already. But generally, there's no market for that.

Most of those who say "I would pay for that" would indeed never do it. Because those people want something very specific - something you can only have via extensions and personal modifications. What you want is very specific to what you personally want and it is different to what everyone else wants.

And no one can create a browser project for your personal preferences.

Just like you will probably say "Librewolf doesn't stay up to date the way I want them to... and they don't turn off all the stupid ideas the way I want them to."

Librewolf is everything one can ask from an open-source Firefox fork.

People always complained when Firefox moved to a more efficient extension system but practically no one cared about Waterfox keeping the old firefox extensions alive. That's because those people are the absolute minority and do not represent the common user.

And what they complain about is not actually the technical change - it is about the overall change in society and what a move away from the more technical approach that allows user modification symbolizes - the dumbing down of software in general. For example, RSS symbolizes the old internet, but the old internet is gone.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#246

Post by inkywatcher »

bluGill wrote: post #217
zanellato19 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Centralization is what makes stuff like this interesting. I come here because the comments are nice, not just because the links are interesting. It's the thing a lot of tech people miss about centralization. It has lots of good effects.

The fediverse gets all those centralization advantages without being centralized. However there are not (yet!) the quantity of people needed to make it work.

Nor quality, unfortunately.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#248

Post by LunaSea »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #202
LunaSea wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's the general problem of economic inequality, though. It's not specific to the Internet. Yes, but advertisement showed that it wasn't a structural limitation and that other options were available. Even if said options themselves had downsides.

Donations were and are a thing for covering hosting costs in many communities.

Not if the site serves videos and has 2024-levels world traffic.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#249

Post by lolinder »

LunaSea wrote: post #195
lolinder wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Y Combinator will continue to exist in a post-attention-economy world. They have proven themselves to be quite adaptable.

> Y Combinator will continue to exist in a post-attention-economy world. They have proven themselves to be quite adaptable. That's not the question. Hacker News was used as an example of an old-school site that worked without monetisation. Which is clearly not the case.

You used the word monetization, everyone else in this subthread is talking about advertising. HN is funded as a piece of content marketing for a startup accelerator.

I suppose you could call the Launch HN threads ads, but only just, and they're of the absolute least objectionable sort—on topic, clearly labeled, unobtrusive, first party, with no tracking.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#250

Post by ghostly_s »

Vinnl wrote: post #40

Here's the Firefox CTO explaining the motivation behind the experiment controlled by this setting, and the measures taken to ensure that it actually is private: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_abo...

And unsurprisingly, he just lies. Here's the crux of the bullshit:

"It’s about measurement (aggregate counts of impressions and conversions) rather than targeting."

No new technology is needed for measuring impressions and conversions. Your ad server can count impressions, and a simple referrer URL can track conversions. An Apache 1.0 server could handle this 30 years ago.

What the advertisers want is all sorts of other info on you, whether you end up as a customer or not. And they and their willing accomplices, now including Mozilla, ardently frame this as a necessity to keep the ad-supported content industry alive. What they never mention is that industry was thriving with the bare minimum of data they had 30 years ago, and more to the point, thrived with NO DATA AT ALL for over a century before it moved onto computers.

Do you think Macy's got any data on "conversions" when they listed their sale prices in the local paper? Yet somehow they were happy to keep paying for it, without any apocalyptic screeds about the imminent "death of newspapers" if we didn't start making customers record their unique customer ID before opening the paper or entering a retailer's store.

The truth is quite contrary to the ad industry's narrative- it's clear the shift of power balance in favor of the advertisers has been associated with all the industries dependent upon it getting worse.

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