"No shady privacy policies or back doors for advertisers" proclaims the Firefox homepage, but that's no longer true in Firefox 128. Less than a month after acquiring the AdTech company Anonym, Mozilla has added special software co-authored by Meta and built for the advertising industry directly to the latest release
    • jabathekek@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      667·
      5 months ago

      I think explaining a system like PPA would be a difficult task.

      IMO that just means they barely understand it themselves. Anyone that understands something with an amount of proficiency can explain it to a child layman and it’ll make sense, given they don’t use technical nomenclature.

      *Layman is a better term. Children are… complicated.

      • solrize@lemmy.worldEnglish
        374·
        5 months ago

        The difficulty is in spinning it to sound non invasive. And of course takes a level of self corruption to even want to do that, since PPA is invasive and you have to delude yourself into thinking otherwise.

    • adarza@lemmy.caEnglish
      591·
      5 months ago

      i read that as more like “nobody would opt in if it was opt-in”.

      • kbal@fedia.io
        291·
        5 months ago

        One Mozilla developer claimed that explaining PPA would be too challenging

        It’s not that difficult to explain. “When you visit the website of a participating advertiser whose ads you’ve seen, do you want us to tell them that someone saw their ads and visited their site, without telling them it was you? Y/N”

        But if they asked such a question almost all of the small fraction of users who bother to read the whole sentence would still see no good reason to want to participate. Coming up with one is that hard part. It requires some pretty fancy rationalizations. Firefox keeping track of which ads I’ve seen? No, thanks.

        If there was an option to make sure that advertisers whose ads I’ve blocked know that they got blocked, I might go for that.

        The writer apparently thinks that the previous Mozilla misstep into advertising land was the Mr. Robot thing six years ago, which seems to confirm my impression that this one is getting a bigger reaction than their other recent moves in this direction. We’ll see if the rest of the tech press picks it up. Maybe one day when the cumulative loss of users shows up more clearly in the telemetry they’ll reconsider.

    • kn0wmad1c@programming.devEnglish
      208·
      5 months ago

      If you can’t explain a difficult concept in a simple way, then you don’t truly understand it.