Original toot:
It has come to my attention that many of the people complaining about #Firefox’s #PPA experiment don’t actually understand what PPA is, what it does, and what Firefox is trying to accomplish with it, so an explainer 🧵 is in order.
Targeted advertising sucks. It is invasive and privacy-violating, it enables populations to be manipulated by bad actors in democracy-endangering ways, and it doesn’t actually sell products.
Nevertheless, commercial advertisers are addicted to the data they get from targeted advertising. They aren’t going to stop using it until someone convinces them there’s something else that will work better.
“Contextual advertising works better.” Yes, it does! But, again, advertisers are addicted to the data, and contextual advertising provides much less data, so they don’t trust it.
What PPA says is, “Suppose we give you anonymized, aggregated data about which of your ads on which sites resulted in sales or other significant commitments from users?” The data that the browser collects under PPA are sent to a third-party (in Firefox’s case, the third party is the same organization that runs Let’s Encrypt; does anybody think they’re not trustworthy?) and aggregated and anonymized there. Noise is introduced into the data to prevent de-anonymization.
This allows advertisers to “target” which sites they put their ads on. It doesn’t allow them to target individuals. In Days Of Yore, advertisers would do things like ask people to bring newspapers ads into the store or mention a certain phrase to get deals. These were for collecting conversion statistics on paper ads. Ditto for coupons. PPA is a way to do this online.
Is there a potential for abuse? Sure, which is why the data need to be aggregated and anonymized by a trusted third party. If at some point they discover they’re doing insufficient aggregation or anonymization, then they can fix that all in one place. And if the work they’re doing is transparent, as compared to the entirely opaque adtech industry, the entire internet can weigh in on any bugs in their algorithms.
Is this a utopia? No. Would it be better than what we have now? Indisputably. Is there a clear path right now to anything better? Not that I can see. We can keep fighting for something better while still accepting this as an improvement over what we have now.
Well, yes. Except for the fact that advertisers now have an excuse to try more invasive things to get to their data
That’s why a trusted third party is handling this. They care a lot, because of they fumble it they are now an untrusted third party and someone else will take care of the anonymization part
They’re going to do this anyway. As far as Firefox is concerned, it’s the browser’s job to stop them. That’s what Firefox is selling: privacy
Assuming I take this for granted, they have already fumbled it by turning on an anti-privacy feature without consent. They can no longer be trusted. Not that you ever should have trusted them because whatever motivation they have for pure moral behavior now, that will change with the wind when more VC money gets involved, or there’s been a change in management.
And firefox has ALREADY had a recent change in management, which is probably why THIS is happening NOW. They just bought an adtech firm for pete’s sake. Don’t trust other people with your data. At all.
Did you even read the article or are you just hating? There is a will known additional non profit that is well known and trusted by probably everyone that knows about it. This nonprofit is handling the anonymization.
I read the damn ticket opened by mcc. I know about the non profit and I don’t trust them with my personal information. Any place that captures valuable data is vulnerable to an attack in the form of financial corruption. I’ll say it again, louder: If they have pure perfect morals now, you’ll be pissed at them in 3 years because management has changed and money got involved.
EDIT: IDK if lemmy has a remindme type bot, but we’re gonna check back in on this one every so often so we can see how long it takes for them to sell out.
If you don’t know who Let’s Encrypt are, please stop putting your whole ass on display.
If they go rogue the internet as a whole will have much, much bigger fucking problems than ad data.
Who, exactly, trusts this third party?
I’m so used to getting treacherously betrayed by third parties distrust is my default setting.
Maybn read the article, chill down a bit. We all hate advertisers here. Everyone trusts Let’s Encrypt, they’re privacy and encryption advocates who run one of the largests online certificates repository. They’re a nonprofit, and they have been doing this for a decade. They’re the reason the internet is a bit safer by promoting widespread implementation of encrypted traffic.
Sure, anyone can turn bad actor at any time. But this guys are starting from a really high bar and have a really strong reputation.
Add: also, this is a good step for Mozilla. We want a internet free from Google, and that includes financially. Google puts practically the totality of the money for the Mozilla foundation. Donations don’t come close to the millions needed to develop and support a web browser. A direct relationship with advertisers, under Mozilla’s terms and not the advertisers predatory terms, would be a good thing.
Nearly everyone, would be my guess. The ISRG is the non-profit behind LetsEncrypt.
C’mon, just take the roofie and we promise we won’t try anything more forceful, little consumer… We promise we’ll stop if you give us just this little bit…
You can liken it to rape all you want, it is very much reality. I’d even go farther, that under capitalism advertisers don’t just have an excuse but an obligation to rape you, if there is no other cost-effective method to get the data their stakeholders want.