71–80 of 112 posts
Are we sure they will be collecting data? You could get personalize advertisements without collecting the data: the browser has your history, it made some kind of profiling (categorize you), and then it request advertisement for your profile.
Key quote: "to summarize, Firefox makes generic encrypted cookieless requests to get enough data to decide locally in Firefox whether content should be added to the new tab page."
Mozilla failed really badly here and honestly I'm not sure if they can ever win back my trust after this. Even though I've read through the tech docs released and I know it's not like they are sending your history all over, it's the way they decided to do this that undermined all their efforts so far.
It's not about where the processing happens or what data is actually transmitted, it's about them pulling this type of shit without clearly asking my permission. And it's not an excuse that Google and others are doing similar things. If you try to win users by publicly saying you're "fighting for privacy", you will be held against higher standards. Mozilla failed really badly here and honestly I'm not sure if they ca…
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Most users would prefer if there would be no ads at all. I don't think putting ads in Firefox will reduce ads on websites.
>I don't think anybody care about the state of digital advertising except marketers. As I have demonstrated with a simple example, this statement is false. >Most users would prefer if there would be no ads at all. Your attempt at moving the goalposts is irrelevant. Therefore, your accusation of Mozilla being dishonest with their goals is not supported by your arguments.
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You have. Disable the feature (yes, it's easy to disable) and donate.
I do donate :) My point is show a message that says 'Subscribe to hide these ads' or something similar. The process you describe is not ideal for most uses who might not even know they can donate. Remove the friction.
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What did they do with it? Have you looked at the insane amount of engineering they have done in the past 8 years? Their Javascript engine is among the fastest in the world. An insane amount of money has been pumped into hiring world-class experts to develop it. Not to mention the continuous improvements to their rendering engine, marketing and awareness projects, charity projects to get minorities like kids and women…
> Their Javascript engine is among the fastest in the world. And still easily the slowest.
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>I don't think anybody care about the state of digital advertising except marketers. As I have demonstrated with a simple example, this statement is false. >Most users would prefer if there would be no ads at all. Your attempt at moving the goalposts is irrelevant. Therefore, your accusation of Mozilla being dishonest with their goals is not supported by your arguments.
You are interpreting him too literally. What he meant was simply that it is obvious that Mozilla cares about income from their ads, not about the state of digital advertising.
Yes. I do not agree with this statement. Mozilla as an organization, as a collective of individuals and as a steward of interests of hundreds of millions of Mozilla products users has diverse and complex interests in the direction of evolution of digital advertising. These interests are not limited to the immediate profits.
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A better blog-post to link to would be https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2015/05/21/providi... which links to an infographic describing how user privacy is protected: https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/files/2015/05/How-... For people who don't like infographics, there's also a textual description: https://blog.mozilla.org/privacy/2015/05/21/putting-our-data...
From your first link: > This is still one of our early steps towards our goal of improving the state of digital advertising for the Web – delivering greater transparency for advertisers, better, more relevant content experiences and, above all, greater control for Firefox users. At least one would hope they could be honest in their goal, I don't think anybody care about the state of digital advertising except markete…
It may sounds strange, but this is really our honest goal. We want to change the ad industry.
The ad industry in its current state is built on foundations we think don't make sense. For instance, the whole idea of abusing cookies, a useful technology, to track where users go around the internet so that the data can be traded, so that others can make guesses about what ads to show... sounds a bit in need of a change.
We know for a fact that many of the players in the business, the ones that matter, don't really care about intruding on people's privacy. For them, it is what they need to do to achieve their goals.
We have to face it, the internet wouldn't thrive without ad-tech. Not many people are willing or able to pay for content. The digital ad industry is important and is here to stay.
That said, we think we can make a change... for the better. We can think about how to do this from first principles, to be the first customer of our tech.
Frankly, no one will be willing to play the new game with us if we can't prove that it works at least as good as the current way they are doing things: the old tech may be clunky, not that effective and there may be a lot of middlemen, but there are 2 decades of investment in the way its built.
Users are affected. Users care. We know we can make for a web with less annoying ads. They don't need to be nagging, vying for your attention the same way they are now. They don't need to be creepy. And you know what? They may not even be ads as you know them today.
We thought about this a lot, and it's a very touchy topic, one which would cause controversy any way we'd broach it . Why do you think we're not being honest?