41–50 of 221 posts
1: Or just caring about your mind constantly battling distractions.
The scare quotes here are uncalled for: it is privacy-preserving. The approach allows measurement without disclosing who, specifically, did what with the ad. The best objection to these proposals isn't privacy, it's that a browser vendor is lifting a finger for advertisers. I guess the fundamental question there is if we prefer to outright shut down online advertising, or give it the tools it needs to be less bad. Op…
Isn't it the same old tools used by other ad companies, like differential privacy?
If you're not paying for it, you are the product.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually think this is a great initiative. Let's be honest, ads and ad tracking is not going anywhere, and Mozilla is trying to come up with a version of that which isn't terrible. And this sounds reasonable.
> Let's be honest, ads and ad tracking is not going anywhere Sure they are - just install ublock origin. Even if you're OK with the snooping and the attention hijacking and the slow pageloads and the pictures of rotting teeth, plenty of malware has been delivered by inept ad networks. Frankly, I find it strange when someone doesn't block ads.
If it became ubiquitous, online advertising would respond with something more embedded in the content and harder to block out.
I really don't like Firefox forks, for the slow updates and because I do genuinely use some bleeding edge features, but I'm tired of Mozilla.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually think this is a great initiative. Let's be honest, ads and ad tracking is not going anywhere, and Mozilla is trying to come up with a version of that which isn't terrible. And this sounds reasonable.
> Let's be honest, ads and ad tracking is not going anywhere Sure they are - just install ublock origin. Even if you're OK with the snooping and the attention hijacking and the slow pageloads and the pictures of rotting teeth, plenty of malware has been delivered by inept ad networks. Frankly, I find it strange when someone doesn't block ads.
There's some good context in the Mozilla kb article on this feature: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attr...
Some more technical details: https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experime...
They deny any direct benefit for the user, and then go on to list some actual downsides (CPU, network, and battery cost & privacy loss) for the user running their software.
> Any benefit people derive from this feature is indirect. [By] Making advertising better
Mozilla never fails to surprise by the choice of their alliances.
> Our view is that the costs that people incur as a result of supporting attribution is small. [...] In comparison [...] The value that an advertiser gains from attribution is enormous.
What would we all do without Mozilla saving dystopian corporate propaganda from the dreadful death through user choice?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much yes though this one is far more privacy-minded, where FLoC was just a thinly-veiled attempt at business as usual. I turned it off immediately nonetheless. One thing to note though is that the switch doesn't exist in mobile Firefox. And it's not clear to me whether that means the feature doesn't exist at all or that I just can't turn it off?
Use Firefox Nightly on Android and you get access to about:config and with that this switch.
Credit goes to this guy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40955452
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually think this is a great initiative. Let's be honest, ads and ad tracking is not going anywhere, and Mozilla is trying to come up with a version of that which isn't terrible. And this sounds reasonable.
> Let's be honest, ads and ad tracking is not going anywhere Sure they are - just install ublock origin. Even if you're OK with the snooping and the attention hijacking and the slow pageloads and the pictures of rotting teeth, plenty of malware has been delivered by inept ad networks. Frankly, I find it strange when someone doesn't block ads.
I'm also a ublock origin user. But it only works because most people in the world are not ublock origin users. I view no ads and am subsidized by the users who do.
The scare quotes here are uncalled for: it is privacy-preserving. The approach allows measurement without disclosing who, specifically, did what with the ad. The best objection to these proposals isn't privacy, it's that a browser vendor is lifting a finger for advertisers. I guess the fundamental question there is if we prefer to outright shut down online advertising, or give it the tools it needs to be less bad. Op…
This would be my preferred outcome no doubt. And after widespread adoption of content blockers like uBlock Origin, the next step should be mass adoption of webpage mirrors (like archive.is and Wayback Machine do now, but more comprehensive), and stop giving impressions to read-only websites.
In this sense, paywalls are a blessing in disguise: I don't ever visit wsj for example and thus any articles from it must be read from archive.is. But reading from mirrors should be more widespread, even for websites not behind a paywall.
If browsers want to improve the situation regarding ads, besides bundling and automatically enabling content blockers, they should also provide integrations to mirrors like archive.is to go further than that and not even risk a page access to ad-infested sites.
> or give it the tools it needs to be less bad.
However there are more than two options. If society reach a compromise to ban targeted ads, this doesn't shut down advertising completely but sets it back to TV-era levels of analytics. This discussion should have happened after Cambridge Analytica.
> Opinions differ, but all major browser vendors are in the latter category.
I thought Chrome were in the business of making sure ads stay bad.