MARK SURMAN, PRESIDENT, MOZILLA Keeping the internet, and the content that makes it a vital and vibrant part of our global society, free and accessible has
there are sites where I WOULD HAVE whitelisted them from adblocking if they had not chosen to make them functionally unusable or not stop nag me me. take youtube. I never minded those ad breaks…but that constant box nagging me to try premium is not acceptable. And then they just had to keep ramping up the adds and are now being a big baby trying to wage war on adbocking. Result: no more youtube. ty for convincing me to not even visit anymore -slow clap- good job ahole.
and ever been to a fandom wiki? used to be named “wikia” so that people could confuse their brand with “wiki”. so many adds jammed into that thing browsers tend to choke if you aren’t adblocking.
I mean sure privacy is great to care about, but nobody even pretends to care about usability.
There’s actually a whole group called the Acceptable Ads Committee who decides on making advertisements distinct and unintrusive… But they don’t have any policies regarding privacy invasion.
They also partner with popular ad blocking software developers, such as AdBlock Plus.
They also have eight members, via their other name “eyeo”, on the W3C PATCG committee (alongside Mozilla, Facebook, Google, more ad companies).
all the groups you cited? are they just toothless and making no impact because it happened way too late? or do they just have a very trash definition of what is intrusive? The major players still intrude all they like the second adblock isn’t there.
by the time ablock plus’s author tried to meet in a middleground advertising was already so far out of control that the users said “f that, no more” and most of us moved to ublock origin. these pricks need regulated into submission but it’ll never happen.
if it became reasonable, I’d turn off my blocking. ain’t gonna happen and we all know it no use pretending these companies are gping to back off thier tactics.
It’s worse: I would say every group is malicious. Ad companies try to look like they are policing themselves, in the hopes that they don’t suffer external regulation. But back when AdBlock Plus started this nonsense, people made uBlock Origin in response. People wouldn’t just take the ad industry at its word.
Now… For some reason, people have changed their minds.
We do not need a corporate structure to maintain software.
This stinks of C-suite justifying their existence when the alternative is well established and very successful.
Where else do you expect them to get the money needed to maintain a web browser?
Well, how did they do it in 90s-2010s? Genuinely asking. What’s changed that they can no longer do this.
Netscape, which was essentially the predecessor to Mozilla, was a well funded VC-backed startup. That’s how they did it.
and only now the investors are asking for their return? Or the investors aren’t re-investing and that’s the problem?
Netscape exited to AOL in 1998. The Netscape founder Marc Andreessen has since then been a successful venture capitalist who loves cryptocurrencies and Donald Trump.
oh dear
Mozilla has a clear conflict of interest in their statements: they are now an ad company. Because of this, they must be approached with skepticism.
Every corporation invested in unhealthy ventures will say it is necessary, and they can do it ethically, regardless of how misleading or untrue it is. They will launder their bad behavior through an organization to make it appear more ethical and healthy.
Mozilla is doing nothing new under the sun. But for some reason, after burning through so much community goodwill, some people are still willing to give Mozilla the benefit of the doubt with a technology that they surely would not have given Google or Adobe or Facebook the same treatment.
Surely we wouldn’t ignore the canary in the coal mine until it was too late. Surely, we wouldn’t look at a huge corporation and say “this time it won’t be the same.”
When Google acquired DoubleClick, they positioned it as a net good for everybody in terms of privacy. DoubleClick was notoriously awful in those terms. Google said (and people, including myself, believed) that by owning them, Google can make them into something better.
Instead, DoubleClick made Google into something much, much worse.
Every corporation invested in unhealthy ventures will say it is necessary, and they can do it ethically, regardless of how misleading or untrue it is. They will launder their bad behavior through an organization to make it appear more ethical and healthy.
My guy… you linked to a youtube documentary about the questionable economics of gold and a blog post about an unreliable certification group associated with Rainforest Alliance. Not because of anything specific to gold or certifications, but… to illustrate the general idea that corporations can be bad?
The level of generality you have to zoom out to, to associate those to Mozilla, is the same level of zooming out typically used for Qanon conspiracy theorizing.
This is exactly the kind of thing that people make fun of with Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. If you’re willing to zoom out to six degrees, you can connect Kevin Bacon to anyone in the history of cinema. It doesn’t prove that Kevin Bacon is personally connected to everyone in the history of cinema, but what it does prove is the frivolousness of reasoning from such stretched out connections. That goes for historical connections, but also funding connections, and, perhaps most importantly here, for conceptual connections. And I would venture that trains of thought hinging on such remote connections are a hallmark of fuzzy thinking, which is why it’s terrible to go from “Rainforest Alliance bad” to “… and therefore Mozilla ad privacy is bad.”
That’s not to say one shouldn’t be concerned about Mozilla’s venture into advertising, but that this is a terribly incoherent way of showing it, that’s as liable to produce overextended false positives connecting anything to anything as it is to produce any insight.
My entire post was about recognizing trends, catching bad behavior before it’s too late, and did not having a corporate heroes. I’m not sure how you interpreted what I wrote so differently.
And my privacy should not come at the cost of capitalists trying to still figure out how to push their poison into my brain; verifiably anonymized or not. Flat out point blank period. The ad-block, tracker fuzzers, and fingerprint meddlers aren’t coming out of my browser; and if they mysteriously ‘disappear’, I’m moving.
Brother. Mozilla is the only browser company letting you keep those things, so you’re not “moving” anywhere. And every feature they’ve announced is not targeted at you; your (and my) customized setup where we never see an ad and leave minimal trace is still fully supported. The PPA is designed to improve the state of Web advertising as a whole, and improve the situation for the normal user who is basically leaving a rich personal history on every site they visit.
PPA does not reduce any tracking data that currently exist in ads, but it does collect extra data without consent.
And since this is targeted for the “normal user,” that makes its label much more deceptive. People might assume disabling it will decrease their privacy, which is untrue in every sense possible.
This will be easy to hate on, but let’s be careful not to get carried away.
Maintaining a web browser is basically the toughest mission in software. LibreWolf and PaleMoon and IceWhatsit and all the rest are small-time amateur projects that are dependent on Firefox. They do not solve the problem we have. To keep a modicum of privacy and openness, the web is de-facto dependent on Firefox continuing to exist in the medium term. And it has to be paid for somehow.
This reminds me of the furore about EME, the DRM sandbox that makes Netflix work. I was against it at the time but I see now that the alternative would have been worse. It would have been the end of Firefox. Sometimes there’s no good option and you have to accept the least bad.
I would love to give Firefox money, as long as they slash their CEO’s ridiculous salary
And slash the CEO as well. Not literally of course.
I’m in the same boat. Mozilla can’t be trusted with donations until they can prove they spend money responsibly. Money, like trust, should not be given by default.
Also, if firefox does better it’ll forward the benefits of a better browser with more usage, more funding, faster features, and more on to the forks for those who want to use them. There is basically no downside for librewolf users here and its to their benefit to encourage for normie’s to use firefox anyway
Getting angry at Mozilla for finding a way to survive by trying to offer something less evil won’t solve the privacy problem in advertising. That has to be solved at the government level, and if anything, what Mozilla is working towards here is probably the best case scenario for a legislated solution in the US’s economy.
what, concretely, do you believe they are offering that is less evil? Their proposed ad tech is no more private than Google’s or Apple’s.
And they can’t afford the army Google and Apple employ to prevent data leaks.
What concrete parts of the Mozilla proposal do you believe is an improvement over Chrome and Safari?
Anonym isnt built into firefox, so idk why you’d think any of this has to do with other browsers.
From a privacy perspective, Anonym is only providing its customers anonymized data which has no direct reference to individual users. That’s way better than say, a site using Facebook pixel being able to learn a hell of a lot about other sites you’ve visited and ads you’ve seen that are served by facebook.
Web platform security isn’t about having an army of people. That’s a gross oversimplification. And Mozilla already operates some massive online services that are juicy targets for hackers anyway, so it’s not like they’re new at this or something.
So by your silence, do you concede that Anonym provides no privacy not already provided by Chrome and Safari? Why are you comparing it to Facebook pixels?
> Anonym isnt built into firefox, so idk why you’d think any of this has to do with other browsers.
Google ads is not built into Chrome either. And yet for some reason Chrome takes more and more control away from the user.
The only reason people use Firefox currently is that people used to trust Mozilla. If Mozilla decides to throw away that trust the obvious decision is for people to switch from #Mozilla #Firefox to a more mainstream browser like Chrome or Safari.
Since you can’t name any reason Anonym is more private than Google Ads, people might as well go with a company that has vastly more expertise in cryptography and security.
> Web platform security isn’t about having an army of people.
Google physically secures data centers across the globe. Both they and Apple have world class expertise in cryptography and hardware, including discovering the family of speculative execution bugs that plague processors. They thoroughly understand the limitations of SGX and related technologies and have designed custom ways to mitigate them. They have world class cryptographers working at the edge of what’s possible with things like homomorphic encryption and MPC.
Let’s be realistic, Anonym is going to run on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. The security will be backed by one of the tech monopolies, and Anonym/Mozilla are now the weak point in the chain.
If I’m choosing between two implementations of the same ad spyware, why would I go with the upstart with less experience and who just did a 180 on their mission?
Dunno why you’re being so aggressive about this.
My first comment that you replied to was primarily about how firefox getting more money through Mozilla being more successful would only serve to benefit forks like librewolf. Its a win-win for Firefox forks for firefox to be more popular and have more resources.
And I also commented about considering what Mozilla is stating their goal as to be a possible better state than the current situation and likely representing the best case, realistic scenario out of the US government in regards to ads and privacy. At rhe end of tje day, the default state of privacy is based on the US laws , bit that doesnt mean that more countries doing better on preivscu legislation otherwise won’t help.
Instead, you are demanding answers from me. I wasn’t here to argue. You could, idk, maybe do some of this leg work yourself rather than demand it from people? If this truly upsets you so much, maybe do something to more productively understand the situation rather than punch people around you who generally also want a more private future with less ads.
So by your silence, do you concede that Anonym provides no privacy not already provided…
What part about my description of Anonym was silence? You could maybe… Go to their site? Read some of the other Mozilla blog posts about it? I’d love more openness from them about how exactly their tools work, and I hope more is shared over time.
Why are you comparing it to Facebook pixels?
Maybe you dont know as much about advertising and tracking on the web as you think. Facebook sells a lot of ads through their sites and apps, but also hosted through clients sites. the data they track to know which ads to serve to eyeballs is gained through Facebook Pixel, which lots of people install on their web sites to gain analytics data from, which both tells facebook who you are when you are on one of their products and also tells other sites using pixel who you are to then target you while present from facebooks dataatores about your activity elsewhere. Putting it on your site also gives you some advantages for selling ads through Facebook, since it gives you targeted data about customers to your site so you can advertise to them where they are anywhere else on the internet. It’s a self-sustaining network of ads > data > ads. Facebook pixel, by its ubiquitous nature, is everywhere which allows facebook to track people across websites to a high degree of accuracy. It’s a big reason you may still feel targeted by ads despite being extremely privacy conscious and blocking ads nearly everywhere. Its just that level of ever-present.
Google analytics provides similar benefits to google for their ad network, it’s just not as blatantly insidious since google doesnt really have a social network to drive more addictive advertising.
This is how targeted ads function. The ads dont have the data, its the other stuff that gets rhe data back to the ad network.
The only reason people use Firefox currently is that people used to trust Mozilla.
Don’t let your bias color your opinion. That may be true of people on the privacy side of the fediverse but its certinally not the only reason people use firefox.
Since you can’t name any reason Anonym is more private than Google Ads, people might as well go with a company that has vastly more expertise in cryptography and security.
See thats the thing: web users aren’t the customers of facebook ads, google ads, anonym, and other ad companies. Businesses are. Businesses either care about being more private, or they care about the appearance of privacy, or they don’t care at all. We as web users have no say in those decisions or priorities in most cases other than to make it such that advertising via trackers is unpopular, ineffective, or pushing to make it illegal.
If you spent some time reading about anonym instead of punching other people in the community, you might have noticed thay Anonym is looking to bypass tracking via tools like facebook pixel and instead using the data that a company has based on user registration, use of the product, etc. Then, they use ML to make assumptions without needing to resort to the level of data collection things like Facebook Pixel do. Plenty of information used to determine what ads to show to someone through detailed tracking can be just as effective as some educated guesses from context in data the company looking to sell ads already has from you being a customer or having provided some intentional information for sales and marketing use, which is exactly what ML is good at. If they truly can provide as good a value to people as Facebook Pixel + Facebook Ads or google analytics + google ads and other competotors without resorting ro invasive tracking, and especially if they can do it cheaper and give companies a marketing win to say they dont use trackers, then there is a chance the future of ads doesnt include tracking. Products being out in rhe market that work well without invading privacy also decreases rhe likliehood of lobbyists blowing up any bills thay would increase privacy. Or at least has way less of it. Its literally the goal of Anonym to provide ads without gaining targeted leads via trackers, but if you didn’t already know that from easy, intentional research, then you aren’t here to get answers, are you?
I’m not here to say Anonym is perfect or that no concerns are valid, but i am here to say that flipping tables and fragmenting the community further isnt going to help anyone. If firefox dies, so too do the forks, so theres reason to hope for the best here and not tilt at windmills.
Don’t let your bias color your opinion.
In another comment, you endorsed the AdTech industry lobbying to create an advertisement monopoly. Charitably interpreted, you could only have meant one of two things:
- Mozilla is uniquely positioned to lobby on behalf of this
- All AdTech companies, even Google and Brave, should get a crack at lobbying their products
But since you don’t seem to be very pro Google, I believe it’s the former… And based on Mozilla providing nothing more substantial than any other company engaged in the incestuous and corporate PATCG, it sure does seem you are the one engaging while wearing rose tinted glasses.
How did you get an endorsement for adtech industry lobbying out of my other comments? And how would my comments insinuate that I want them to create a monopoly? You’re engaging in some heavy reframing and redefining of what I’ve stated.
Mozilla deserves criticism. But i dont think it makes any sense to campaign against firefox as is happening all over this post. You are the one who began demanding an argument about Anonym on a comment where I was suggesting that firefox itself is still a net good, especially for people who want to continue to use forks like librewolf. Whether this path Mozilla is on ends up working out or not, firefox is still far superior in all sorts of other domains of privacy and user choice when it comes to a browser, and that allows the forks to exist, too. People should use forks if they want to, but they shouldn’t discourage people from using firefox if they aren’t interested in a fork.
I don’t actually give a crap about Anonym, aside from the mission seeming better, nor do i believe I’ve endorsed Anonym anywhere. All I’ve said is thay they are steps closer to a realistic possibility for the current US political, legal, and economic environment to have any measure of privacy in advertising. You are the one trying to put the endorsement in my mouth and reflavoe my words as advocating for an adtech monopoly.
I’d rather Ads not exist. I’d rather tracking not exist. But Mozilla planting a flag on that hill only means they go extinct unless the political, legal, or economic environment of our society changes. And Mozilla going extinct also means the forks will most likely go with it, and that is a far worse outcome than Mozilla doing some ad stuff in a different business unit.
And based on Mozilla providing nothing more substantial than any other company engaged in the incestuous and corporate
I agree the PATCG is a pit of scum. But while it exists and it influences how Firefox will need to operate to be competitive and work with web standards, why should they be faulted for being a part of it?
what Mozilla is working towards here is probably the best case scenario for a legislated solution in the US’s economy.
No thank you, I don’t want an ad company dictating legislation. Even if it wasn’t in bed with Facebook, I wouldn’t want that.
If it were up to me, ads wouldn’t be legal but we live in this society and it has an economy that won’t ever get there without sweeping change.
Ad companies do and will continue dictating legislation in the US, so I’m not sure why Mozilla now being an ad company and the parent foundation historically being involved in privacy law and lobbying for privacy measures matters to you so much. Its not like the Mozilla foundation has been that radical historically anyway.
All this mozilla hate just further divides the people wanting something better. We domt all have to agree on what better vs best vs perfect is if were all pushing in the direction of better for now.
I can’t believe I need to explain this (and I kind of already have), but you should never put any corporation on a pedestal just because they are proffering the second worst option instead of the very worst.
Ad companies do and will continue dictating legislation in the US
And we shouldn’t normalize it.
Normally, I would mention Facebook driving the way Firefox ads function, but you seem to have no issue with Facebook or even Google being in an incestuous relationship to various degrees with Mozilla, I guess that’s not even a point you’ll care about.
All this mozilla hate just further divides the people wanting something better.
People say this about Mr. Beast and his repulsive children’s snacks and chocolate bars, which he says are a healthy alternative to the very worst options. Or Elon Musk and his electric atrocities. I would be aghast if the government handed monopoly political power over to either of those people.
And yet here you are, insinuating the government should legislate monopoly power over advertisements and simply hand the reigns over to the corporate interests that want to maximize profits at any cost.
And yet here you are, insinuating the government should legislate monopoly power over advertisements and simply hand the reigns over to the corporate interests that want to maximize profits at any cost.
I have no idea where you got this idea I’m advocating for an adtech monopoly.
You continue to put words in my mouth and come at this thread with aggression and demanding statements. You dont just get to demand a debate, and you certinally aren’t going to sway someone’s opinion by putting someone on the defense, putting words in their mouth, and attacking character right out the gate. Edit: apologies, someone else was doing the more aggressive responses. Difficult to keep track of this stuff on mobile sometimes.I have no idea where you got this idea I’m advocating for an adtech monopoly.
You continue to put words in my mouth
Mozilla: For the foreseeable future, there’s a lot of money in advertising, and we want some of it. It’s all over the Internet. Why shouldn’t some of the profit go to people like us, people who wish things were different even while bravely facing the harsh reality that there is no other choice but to devote ourselves to commercial advertising?
We know that everyone in our community will hate the idea, but surely this too is a sign that we are on the right path. By doing unpopular things, we demonstrate the courage that’s needed to save the Internet from the kind of future where Mozilla can’t get a piece of the biggest market on the Internet, the only one that matters, the market for advertising.
They should find other ways to make money. There are so many different ways they could create value.
Also I’m not convinced that Mozilla would make much off of ads anyway as the ad space is very competitive
There are so many different ways they could create value.
Such as?
Selling products and services
what products and services?
Theyve tried that many times already
Not really
They create 100 random things no one wanted and then offered then mostly for free. They have a massive management problem. I think the biggest issue is how risk adverse they are. They don’t want to take big risks so they instead take a bunch of small useful risks that fail. They need to start something and then commit. Also baking more things into Firefox is not the way forward. They need stuff that is separate and useful.
they tried a bucnh of paid services, like their vpn, email alias and data broker remover.
Do you think you can come up with a better idea?
Why not ask the CEO of Mozilla? They’re paid to have all the smart ideas, allegedly.
