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For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

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

#261

Post by _heimdall »

dspillett wrote: post #249
_heimdall wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone bothered enough by advertising can stop using whatever product has been ruined by ads, or find ways to remove the advertising. More laws and larger governments doesn't have to be the answer to all problems. If consumers care enough they'll change their usage, if they don't change their usage they likely don't care enough.

> Anyone bothered enough by advertising I don't particularly have an issue with advertising itself. If adverts get on my nerves on a product or page I just leave, as you suggest: problem solved. The actual issue is the stalky tracking of me throughout my life that is currently inseparable from the advertising. I can't just walk away from that: it happens behind my back, it has happened before I get the chance to walk…

> Which will not stop the stalky behaviour of the ad industry. They'll still track me if I happen to click the wrong thing, or track me through my connections to other people. I suppose I could walk away from life and become a hermit, but that would be just a little extreme.

You could make some real progress without being a hermit though, it doesn't have to be all or nothing. Don't use a smartphone, limit as much of your time online as you can, and pay in cash when you can. Those wouldn't make you a hermit but would seriously limit the data you make available to be gobbled up in the first place.

> This has often been said by companies and their shills. Oddly, they are all in favour of extra laws and government reach when it is, for example, to protect what they consider to be their intellectual property.

Well that's actually what I see as a better approach, remove protections for those companies and industries rather than trying to create new laws to limit them. Its a strange balancing act to attempt to both protect and limit an industry with different laws, we would be better off not doing either.

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

#262

Post by pyinstallwoes »

temporarely wrote: post #162

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?

Only legal form of advertising should be in public marketplaces, that is it.

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

#263

Post by MiddleEndian »

MrAlex94 wrote: post #110
ranguna wrote: post #42

https://librewolf.net/ And fallback to Firefox when things don't work. Which is usually on sketchy websites, websites that have heavy bot protection and fingerprinting or ones that use gpu APIs.

A few criticisms of LibreWolf: * There is no legal entity behind the project. Should anything ever happen with the project (it can happen, even if unlikely), there are no legal ramifications. * The binaries aren't signed. Yes, code signing is a bit of a racket, but there is some merit in it. * There is no auto-update mechanism. Might not seem like a big deal, but IMO it is, especially on Windows where you're recommen…

>There is no auto-update mechanism. Might not seem like a big deal, but IMO it is, especially on Windows where you're recommended to rely on 3rd party client to update the browser for you. You've now added a middle man, and since the binaries are not signed... well there's no guarantee you aren't downloading a malicious binary.

To me, this seems like a plus. If you want users to update, provide them with something worth updating to. This tracking suddenly being enabled for a ton of users is the very result of automatic updates.

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

#265

Post by cdrini »

berkes wrote: post #189
sph wrote: post #34

What do you expect from a company indirectly owned and controlled by Google money? I can't wait for Ladybird to get good, in a decade realistically, swimming against a massive current of Google pushing its unstandardised nonsense on Chrome, and web developers jumping on the bandwagon, making web standards more and more complex by the day so no one ever is able to catch up. You can add to the dead internet theory the…

They aren't owned nor controlled by Google. And certainly not directly. I presume you refer to the fact that most income of Mozilla comes from Google paying a fee to have their search be the default. While that is worrysome, it's not control nor ownership. Let alone direct control. At most it gives Google leverage.

The previous post said "indirectly" controls; maybe a misread?

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

#266

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

ho_schi wrote: post #183
temporarely wrote: post #162

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?

Yep. One of the things which the FSF did right was the GPL. They didn’t tried like programmers hack against bad things which never works in long term. The bad people will change the API, lock the bootloader, implement a problematic standard (ACPI, SecureBoot) or add more DRM. We cannot solve political issues (law) with technical solutions (programming). If we don’t like locked iPhones, the solution is a law. If we do…

I was with you until secureboot.

At least on my Debian I retain full control using the shim and my own enrolled keys. So seems less an issue with the technology but perhaps with how some vendors (that are already locking you in anyway) use secureboot?

from https://wiki.debian.org/SecureBoot

>> Shim then becomes the root of trust for all the other distro-provided UEFI programs. It embeds a further distro-specific CA key that is itself used for as a trust root for signing further programs (e.g. Linux, GRUB, fwupdate). This allows for a clean delegation of trust - the distros are then responsible for signing the rest of their packages. Shim itself should ideally not need to be updated very often, reducing the workload on the central auditing and CA teams.

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

#267

Post by mihaaly »

temporarely wrote: post #162

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

#268

Post by mananaysiempre »

cynicalsecurity wrote: post #57
lopis wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this line is very important: > First, in the absence of alternatives, there are enormous economic incentives for advertisers to try to bypass these countermeasures, leading to a perpetual arms race that we may not win. It's very likely that this arms race will lead to DRM in web publications and video feeds (which Google is already experimenting with).

DRM on a website = no search engine can scan the website = no users = the DRM website dies.

You’ll notice that Google search now shows excerpts from things you can’t actually see visiting the site (paywalled news, paywalled scientific articles). The age of “show us exactly what users see or get downranked into oblivion” is long gone, sadly.

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

#269

Post by _heimdall »

sloowm wrote: post #259
_heimdall wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone bothered enough by advertising can stop using whatever product has been ruined by ads, or find ways to remove the advertising. More laws and larger governments doesn't have to be the answer to all problems. If consumers care enough they'll change their usage, if they don't change their usage they likely don't care enough.

If I walk outside I'm bombarded by ads. Almost all websites have been tailored to include ads and hide information. You're tracked on all devices you touch. Vaguely referencing more laws or larger government doesn't mean anything. We're not talking about all problems but a specific one. There is an obvious imbalance between the power and information an individual consumer can use to shield themselves from activities…

Seeing ads outside likely doesn't harm you though, you can ignore them. If your city is plastered with ads to a point at where you can't stand it you can always move, that's just another part of a city that someone may decide they don't like and want something different.

> Almost all websites have been tailored to include ads and hide information. You're tracked on all devices you touch.

That's really the crux of it though. The problem isn't just that companies are gobbling up all this data, it's also that we make the data available in the first place.

Stop using a smartphone and taking it everywhere with you, limit what you do online in general, and pay cash when you can. A few simple changes would really reduce the data you make available, I'm sure there are other simple changes I'm missing here but the point is that we don't have to protect data that doesn't exist.

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

#270

Post by mihaaly »

latexr wrote: post #87
eco wrote: post #17

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

> It’s clear in retrospect that we should have communicated more on this one What isn’t clear, in retrospect or otherwise, is why companies/apps/services need to keep learning this lesson. The user outcry was utterly predictable from even before the first web article was out. The fact that no one with decision power at Mozilla saw it coming is worrying: either they have zero understanding of people’s concerns for pri…

Acting stupid and being uninformed, clueless, incompetent CTO/CEO/CXX is less prone to lawsuits than admitting intent of harm.
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