For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default
heise.de
heise.de
1) Hamburger menu -> Settings -> Privacy & Security
2) scroll down to the new section entitled "Web Site Advertising Preferences".
3) Make sure the box marked "Allow web sites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement" is not checked.
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attr...
The underlying pref is dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled. I'm going to force this off in my policies.
Now I install an organizational policy that sets the prefs. I use NixOS to apply this and it looks like this:
environment.systemPackages = [(pkgs.firefox.override {
extraPrefs = ''
lockPref("dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled", false);
''
})];
Edit: This is creating a lib/firefox/mozilla.cfg. IDK how exactly this applies to other distros.
The syntax is: user_pref("dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled", false); // Disable Privacy-Preserving Attribution
You can find a lot of examples and "documentation" on https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js
sudo rm $(which firefox)I don't care if the feature cures cancer or gives me a free puppy. I don't want a feature running without my explicitly commanding it to run.
https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_abo...
> First, in the absence of alternatives, there are enormous economic incentives for advertisers to try to bypass these countermeasures, leading to a perpetual arms race that we may not win.
It's very likely that this arms race will lead to DRM in web publications and video feeds (which Google is already experimenting with).
And maybe that will be the Web healing. If all the value extraction moves elsewhere, we might finally have a sane web of hypertext documents again.
I hope enough mainstream things remain on the open web for it to be unrealistic to fully block.
I dunno. Considering the balkanization of the web maybe I should get in to ham radio or something.
Realistically, the best outcome at this point is that enough users are willing to send enough data to advertisers so they allow the open web to continue.
The alternative is that sites will eventually only work in Chrome or Safari on limited, locked down platforms (read: no Linux support at all).
But like I said, I'm not a lawyer and have no idea what I'm talking about.
So we're not even going to try.
At best, politicians could jump on the "solution", but then why are Mozilla not already lobbying in that case? Why is the first party they are reaching out to the wolf in this drama?
Regardless, Mozilla has lost me at this point as a user. This being opt-out is inexcusable and I will find ways to gravitate away from them as I should not need my poor package maintainers to be paranoid with their upstream code in the same way they have to be with Chrome in order to protect us from developer abuse like this. Will try Mull on mobile now, hopefully it is viable, and see how I solve the desktop situation when I can find the time.
I might be misremembering?
Chrome was launched 2008; Safari had its first release in 2003. And I was using the early Phoenix builds (later the name change to Firefox happened) in 2001. The version of internet explorer around the time Chrome launched was v7. IE 6 was already old news by then. And IE 8 launched soon after the Chrome launch. 9, 10, and 11 followed. And then the switch to Edge happened; which was a complete rewrite of their browser engine. Only in 2020, MS announced switching to Chromium. So, that's about 12 years of MS trying to hold on before they finally gave up.
This has happened before. Remember the critique against Encrypted Media Extensions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encrypted_Media_Extensions): Oh no, DRM in the browser! But remember that web video used to require Adobe Flash for the longest time, and even after a decade of HTML5 video, sites were still clinging onto Adobe Flash (and later also Microsoft Silverlight) for what turned out to be DRM purposes. At the time, these plagued proprietary blobs were not going anywhere. Except, after EME had widely supplanted this last holdout usecase, they were quietly allowed to die. The result is that we have much smaller-scoped proprietary blobs in the form of content delivery modules with a lot fewer bugs and portability issues.
The current situation is worse.
EME requires that the browser ship with a DRM library like Widevine.
Flash used an industry standard plugin model and could work in any browser.
Yes, and trackers are investing large sums of money into breaking those measures.
If you give advertisers a lawful non-user-threatening way to measure their ads performance, a lot of that money may disappear.
(Or it may not, or it may disappear either way. That one market is crazy and I know almost nothing about it. But the claim that the money may disappear is valid, and you have to provide a valid counter-claim if you want to contest it. Calling it evil doesn't cut it.)
> we consider modal consent dialogs to be a user-hostile distraction from better defaults, and do not believe such an experience would have been an improvement here.
You know what's user-hostile? Doing things without the user's knowledge or consent. The new tab page of Firefox after an update often advertises features of the release Mozilla sees important (their VPN offering, Firefox on mobile, etc.). This time the new tab page told me nothing about this change. Communicating it to me was "free" and they still actively refused to do it.
"Doing something" about surveillance starts with transparency but if Mozilla's leadership doesn't see this as important they have no place leading such a company. Mozilla doesn't seem to wrap its head around the fact that their users use Firefox because they don't want the same kind of shady tactics Google or Microsoft keep pulling, they don't want their browser control to be handed over to some guy in a board room who needs a PR team to give a lengthy non-answer to the problem.
I see a lot of words spent on why they came up with this technology but barely a mention about the biggest issue here especially from a company that presents itself as a champion of user rights: they pushed the change in the dead of night and took an actively hostile decision in the users' names by enabling a clearly controversial setting without any warning or communication.
> we should have communicated more on this one
This kind of PR speak for "we actively kept it hidden" is the best way to alienate the users who investigated and chose this browser for a reason.
If you have telemetry disabled, this feature is also disabled, even though that isn't represented in the UI and looks like it's turned on.
It's not good that it exists and is on by default, but if you have already opted out of telemetry previously, you're opted out of this too.
> I’ll do my best to address [your questions], though I’ve got a busy week so it might take me a bit.
That means: I'll answer the easy ones, and ignore the hard ones, or ask the legal team to come up with some weasel words.
Yeah, like Mozilla.
This is not the first time they silently added tracking and avertisement. The toggle with "firefox shares basic telemetry with the adcompany Adjust" has been there activated by default since a while (among other stuff). This is just more tracking from them, while claiming to defend privacy. Another day, another scandal.
What isn’t clear, in retrospect or otherwise, is why companies/apps/services need to keep learning this lesson. The user outcry was utterly predictable from even before the first web article was out. The fact that no one with decision power at Mozilla saw it coming is worrying: either they have zero understanding of people’s concerns for privacy or they don’t care. Neither is good.
Or the third option: they feel the tradeoff of HN & co's criticism style is not a big deal in the end. Criticism of Mozilla in general is very warranted right now, but the way(s) in which everyone is doing so just feels very out of touch with the actual situation. ;P
They're - by their own words - trying to do something in a privacy preserving way because the ad industry is not going away. They might fuck it up at first, and that's why it's an experiment. It's also possible to disable it, it's not like you're trapped in it.
This thread in general feels like it leaves Mozilla no room to experiment or find any form of growth. People want them to be "just a browser" but then also expect them to be stewards of the web - and then cry foul when they actually try to find a setup that fits into the current model of the web.
Or so they say, in order to make people be OK with it. They might play the waiting game and in a year or two will make the setting not do anything and still collect / send data, hoping that by that time people have forgotten.
I'd be fine to continue the discussion if you can find a way to engage without assuming that the people who build one of the last checks on the open internet are somehow trying to maliciously invade your privacy.
The person you replied to made a reasonable point and your response reads as defensive and dismissive. Do you have an interest in Mozilla we should know about?
I explained to them that I’m open to discussing but there’s nothing to be gained when the comment starts off in conspiracy theory. It’s an open source project, people will 100% notice if they tried to do what the parent comment is suggesting.
> It’s an open source project, people will 100% notice if they tried to do what the parent comment is suggesting.
No-one thinks they'll lie about it. They'd announce it quietly just like this change, letting the fuss blow over. The average user would never even realise and Firefox would continue on its journey towards user hostility.
OP specifically said “make the setting do nothing while still collecting the data”. I don’t know about you, but a setting that acts like that would be akin to lying.
The comment chain is pretty clear here IMO.
Well, that is what Firefox did here. They created a new feature, defaulted it to on, in direct contradiction to user choices. We know this because this Web Site Advertising feature defaults to on even where the user has the strictest level of tracking protection enabled and even when the DNT option is selected. Even so, Mozilla has decided that this form of tracking is not covered by those clear signals of user intent.
So why not believe that Mozilla will do this again. Deprecate existing tracking choices and enable Web Site Advertising tracking for everyone. Like this change, it would be announced and decried and ultimately used by the majority of users who don't follow browser changelogs.
What will happen is that privacy advocates like me will recommend not to use Firefox, as it's functionally equivalant to Chrome is this respect and far less supported, and Firefox will continue to die.
This pains me as a former contributor and advocate, but it's almost inevitable now unless a privacy-focused non-profit can fork Firefox and leave Mozilla to it's decline. I would even pay for a Firefox fork, but I will never donate to or purchase again from Mozilla.
No, let's be very clear here: what Mozilla/Firefox did here was default users in to a setting without good notice on how to opt out.
This is different from what was said in this thread, which is making the setting do nothing while still collecting the data. If you disable the setting/opt out, then the data isn't being collected.
That's a framing so charitable to Mozilla that it is untrue. Again, do you have an interest you should be declaring in this conversation?
> This is different from what was said in this thread, which is making the setting do nothing while still collecting the data.
No, it's not. It ignores the Strict Tracking Protection and DNT settings and opts in users to tracking. It's absolutely identical to possibility posited by the other commenter.
For all your pontificating above about other people's comments, it seems the only person commenting in bad faith is you.
As a user of Firefox, I feel like I'm in a constant battle with Mozilla/FF to disable every new bad idea they have. Every time I'm forced into a surprise update I didn't ask for/try_to_install, something gets worse. This isn't an unusual state for commercial software, but Firefox is supposed to try to not be commercial.
I am not interested in a discussion with a person who gives the benefit of the doubt of a company who has clearly not only made a Faustian deal but is now looking to expand partnership with the people that nobody wants tracking their machines and activities.
Because as we both know, in the entire history of humanity there were NEVER any conspiracies when there is money to be made, right? Wink wink.
That deal with Google isn’t enough to leap to the conspiracy theory here though. The ad industry isn’t going away, Mozilla seems to want to try to make it work for all parties.
If you want to let perfect be the enemy of good, though, go for it. shrug
“That’s just politicians getting money from financial criminals.”
“That’s just police getting money from organized violence.”
“This is fine.”
Mozilla is welcome to experiment. The issue here is:
- The default opts the client in instead of the client making that choice to be a Guinea pig in the experiment
- I get emails almost weekly that amount to Mozilla playing the role of internet privacy police. They *are* well aware of the rights and wrongs. Are they going to call out themselves?
- As for growth? How about paid pro-privacy email hosting? And a suite of applications (a la Google docs)? Advertising might not be going away but there are still opportunities that align with Mozilla's ideals and brand... And they're too busy being hypocritical internet police???
I think this is a reasonable critique, even if I personally don't find it a big deal. If it's privacy preserving, I don't necessarily give a shit if it's defaulted on - especially if there's a way to disable it.
(IMO, defaulting it on and then widely announcing how to disable it is what they should have done, and their bungled communications on this is biting them)
> I get emails almost weekly that amount to Mozilla playing the role of internet privacy police. They are* well aware of the rights and wrongs. Are they going to call out themselves?*
Why would they call themselves out here...? They have stated, very bluntly, that they are trying to do something in a privacy preserving way. They are acting in line with their stated intentions/role/etc.
> As for growth? How about paid pro-privacy email hosting? And a suite of applications (a la Google docs)? Advertising might not be going away but there are still opportunities that align with Mozilla's ideals and brand... And they're too busy being hypocritical internet police???
Those are wholly separate business ventures, whereas dealing with the advertising behemoth is an unfortunate part of the browser ecosystem today. Someone, somewhere, is going to have to contend with this - and Mozilla is somewhat uniquely positioned to explore here.
If you think Apple or Google are going to do it without perverse incentives, then I don't know what to tell you.
Instead, we have had Mozilla sprawling in numerous directions secondary to the browser and failing in nearly all of them.
If you dont grow at double digit percentages year of year, are you even trying?
One reason is that the people who would be promoting Firefox aren't.
Personally I feel mostly ashamed to admit I'm using Firefox. In theory Firefox is great. In practice they coming up with new ways to treat their core user base badly.
Individual promotion of Firefox worked very well when the browser(s) it was trying to displace were effectively frozen in time.
Chrome (et al) and Safari are not those browsers. The average user isn't going to get a markedly different experience by switching to Firefox.
When Firefox started is was not a copy of existing browsers. There is no reason it would have to be now. But they have rejected their core users. So now the only option left is a Chrome clone because that is what people are used to.
This isn’t even getting into base level stuff like available engineering resources, or the scenarios where the other vendors often control or have deals to give them favorable distribution on platforms.
This isn’t the IE6 era. It’s a significantly different and harder problem.
There would be value in being the only browser to actually stop when users tell them no. But they seem incapable of listening.
I don't see how trying to find a privacy-preserving way of dealing with the ad conundrum makes them not a privacy-focused browser/company.
You'd need to otherwise cite something re: undisclosed telemetry, considering the project is open source... so I'm not sure how exactly it'd be undisclosed.
You're presenting it as though any change would be met with hostility, but the alternative is that they're only met with hostility because they keep making changes that hurt the users. A little while ago they announced that they were working on properly supporting vertical tabs and tab groups; that wasn't met with any hostility. Of course, in the same announcement they said they were planning to dumb down the rest of the interface even more, which was. But the point stands; they can get a positive reaction by making changes their users actually like, they just don't do that as often as they do the other thing.
But these days, Chrome is plenty good enough for most people. Even if Firefox had a perfect privacy story and focused on their core users’ every whim, I don’t think their market share would grow.
IIRC, when Firefox started, it was very similar to the full Mozilla Suite with some features removed (which is not surprising, since it started as a Mozilla Suite derivative and they shared a lot of code). It has a long lineage going back to the old-school Netscape Navigator.
That’s the second option: they don’t care.
> This thread in general feels like it leaves Mozilla no room to experiment
If you you’re going to experiment with something that’s going to cause this amount of backlash (and my criticism is that they didn’t take the obvious reaction into account), you show a dialog on first run that tells you what the feature is, perhaps include a “Learn More” link, and have an option to accept or deny. You can even have the former as the default. And do it in your betas first.
Would that still cause some backlash? Possibly. But it would’ve been significantly milder and you would have seen a lot more defence of Mozilla for not doing without asking.
Mozilla in particular is frequently pulling crap like this and getting flak for it. They have to constantly apologise and back track. After a while you’d expect they learned something.
Well, they learned: they fuck up, backtrack & apologize (it is free, no real impact, so no worries), and life goes on.
Apart from a market share that is continuously tending towards zero.
That's the start of full blown stockholm syndrome.
No data is ever fully anonymous, don't pretend otherwise. So no data should be send at all.
This is an area that we are stuck contending with. Legal solutions are needed here but that path is mired by complex and powerful lobbying. If Mozilla can push for a more private or more protective - even if not fully private or fully protective - then I’d like to see where it goes.
If you refuse to engage with the ad industry they just ignore you. Oh and the company that owns a large part of the world's ad industry and owns the browser that has 65% market share also pays like 90% of your bills.
I mean, what's step two of your glorious plan to charge fists raised into battle?
It seems far more likely that the remaining 3% are the few people who care, and therefore, "pulling this shit" did not cause the current market share.
I’m willing to put up with slowness and incompatability when I feel like firefox is on my side. Now? I’m going back to Safari.
Firefox compromising heralds its own irrelevance.
You might believe that the advertisers get less of your data if you use Firefox.
Similarly: you might be less likely to have your house burgled if there are locks on the doors and a burglar alarm, even though people with those things still get burgled sometimes. You might be less cold outdoors in winter if you wear a parka, even though it's still cold. You might be less bored if you buy/rent/stream some interesting books, music and movies, even though having those doesn't guarantee never being bored. You might be less likely to lose your next chess game if you practice tactics and learn openings, even though you'll still lose if you play Magnus Carlsen. You might be less likely to have a heart attack or stroke if you take those antihypertensives the doctor prescribed you, even though those are still tragically things that can happen to anyone. Etc., etc., etc.
Very few things are absolute and perfect. It's usually a matter of "less" versus "more".
This latest thing gives advertisers more information about me than they would have if Firefox didn't do it. (Unless I turn it off, which in fact I have done.) It doesn't give them very much information about me. I'm pretty sure they would get much more information about me if I switched to using Chrome (e.g., because Firefox supports better adblockers).
For the avoidance of doubt, I do think Mozilla should have made more noise about what they were doing, I do think there's a repeated pattern of them putting things into Firefox that their users don't really want and hoping no one will notice[1], I do think that says something bad about how Mozilla is run, and I would be happier if the Firefox project were run by people less inclined to do such things. But none of that means that you might as well use Chrome instead of Firefox, if you happen to value the things that Firefox still does better than Chrome.
[1] Actually, I think they know perfectly well that some users will notice, and they've decided it's overall better PR to do the thing quietly, wait for people to complain, and then say "oh, whoops, we should have been more open about this, we're so sorry and will totally not do the same thing again in six months".
Shortly as Chrome implements Privacy Sandbox, both Chrome and Firefox will support the same levels of advertising tracking. For Chrome, this is a privacy upgrade of sorts, but for Firefox, this is a definite downgrade.
As Firefox converges on Chrome in this area, the privacy advantage evaporates.
Chrome forces extensions to use "Manifest v3" rather than "v2", which cripples some ad-blockers; in particular, the full version of uBlock Origin will run on Firefox but not on Chrome. (I'm not sure of the details about the v2->v3 migration; maybe that isn't universally true yet. If not, it will be soon.)
"Reduces" and "evaporates" are not the same thing. I see the case for the former, not for the latter.
Well, right now, with their dwindling market cap, I feel like their only userbase is HN & co's type of user.
They repeatedly failed to increase their user base with non privacy conscious adjacent communities. So antagonizing the ONLY folks that go through the trouble of installing a non default browser to have a worse user experience seems like a big brain moment.
They’d be really screwed if Google didn’t give them a good deal. Somewhat wondering if Google just keeps them around to stave off the appearance of being a monopoly.
The web seems to have gotten pretty unsustainable in general. Might consider upgrading to Lynx or something like that.
I have this crazy theory that Firefox could be completely sustained by users willing to pay for it.
I mean... Mozilla Co definitely couldn't be sustained by users money only, but Firefox could.
The only path I can see for a healthy web (if this is even possible right now) is to completely liberate Firefox from Mozilla's shackles and mismanagement. A free and open-source browser should be treated more like a public good, such as a Linux distribution, than a money-making machine.
No shit.
they're bending for the ad industry because they want their money. they could also just keep blocking their tracking and call it a day.
> the ad industry is not going away
But users do. Let them have a great faking love affair with the ad industry.
There's no need to imply that people don't comprehend things here. ;P
Do people really expect that? I'm glad they're part of whatwg etc., but I'd much prefer they just made a good browser instead of tooting their own horns about how much good they're doing for society. In the end I think society would have been better off if they'd just focus on good tech like Gecko/Servo and Rust and not bothered with all their side stuff.
I've seen enough of:
Step 1 - outrageous move Step 2 - apologize, progressively pull back Step 3 - people spread word they made it better Step 4 - stick to still outrageous but comparatively better "middle" move
To really give it any excuse anymore. And so have you. If "Unity" tells you nothing... I'd like that rock, please, I'll need it to survive the incoming 4 years of social media.
I'm not saying its impossible for apologies to be in bad faith, just that if it becomes impossible to apologize and move on after making a mistake, it becomes impossible to do anything productive.
Society will not collapse if we start holding these monsters to account; the opposite.
Otherwise this is just vengence. If you never forgive there is no rational reason for corporations (or anyone) to stop doing whatever objectionable things they are doing, since it would already be a sunk cost.
They are trying to find a funding model that makes them independent from Google.
- Building a fast, privacy-oriented browser that keeps up with web standards and fixes security bugs takes people, organisation and therefore money. Yes, much more than that CEO salary.
- No one wants to buy for a browser.
- No one wants to pay a subscription fee for a browser.
So you are left with ads. Mozilla is trying to find a balance there between privacy and ads with a clearing house approach. People who hate ads out of principle scream. How should browser development be funded?
One of the most common Mozilla complaints I see on the web is that you cannot fund Firefox development directly. People want to give money to it, but cannot.
Which makes sense, I guess. Anecdotally, Mozilla is by far the company I know with the most vocal users that get completely ignored.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/2/24147007/google-paid-apple...
It's like email. You need to get people over the mental hump. But then if you offer a good product, buyers will be happy they got over it.
Here you go! Insert credit card here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30665913
If the Mozilla foundation creates a donation button with the condition that the money goes solely to browser development (no CEO salary or political activism) I will donate.
The one funding model they haven't experimented with at all is actually asking people to pay for Firefox. Donations or subscription, they haven't even tried it once.
And yet people will over and over again insist that that would never work. Doesn't that strike you as odd? They're willing to flail about trying thing after thing after thing that their users hate and yell about and they end up having to pull back, they're willing to burn credibility over and over again, but the one funding model that their users keep telling them they want they refuse to even try on the grounds it would never work.
You can even donate money today: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/donate/ From memory, Mozilla's spent years trying to get donations through asking people nicely and in relatively unobtrusive ways in-browser for years. You can even give monthly - a subscription, if you will.
Not only have they tried both donations and subscriptions, but their efforts have been resoundingly ignored. To the point where you are far from the first person to fault them for supposedly choosing to not do what they demonstrably do.
Perhaps people suggest that donations and subscriptions don't work well or reliably because there's history showing that.
I don't want a VPN. And I don't want to pay money to a Mozilla VPN of which some unspecified percentage will actually get used to pay for Firefox development (with the rest actually paying for the VPN). I honestly feel my money does more harm than good paying for the VPN because it creates a false impression of where the demand is.
I don't want a subscription to an unrelated service, I want a subscription to Firefox. I want my money to go into a stream that unambiguously shows my support for the single Mozilla project that I care about.
> You can even donate money today
That money will not (and I believe cannot) go to Firefox. As presently structured the corporation does all Firefox development, and the corporation cannot receive money from the foundation, so donations to Mozilla do nothing for Firefox.
> Not only have they tried both donations and subscriptions, but their efforts have been resoundingly ignored.
Not ignored, for the reasons stated above they haven't actually done what you say they've done.
I do expect that's the next step at Mozilla - locking features behind paywall with some premium plan. Cloud sync probably will fall into that basket. And if that eventually won't work - they'll surely announce it's time to "sunset".
Because it won't. And there is mountains of data to back it up. People will not pay if they don't have to.
Some people will, for sure, but to get those some people to carry the weight of "all the people" is totally untenable.
Besides, Chrome is "free".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
They could easily gate off certain features behind a paid build, so either you pay or compile it yourself from source. Downstream packagers could of course do whatever they want (eg Debian). However, it creates a minor amount of friction for a relatively large fraction of the user base, and moreover sets the baseline expectation that this is not really "free as in beer", even though it remains "free as in freedom".
See also: Sublime Text, which, despite being closed-source, is 100% free-as-in-beer to use in perpetuity, and yet somehow they make enough money To not only continue development, but even start developing other products (Sublime Merge), even as their brand recognition wanes and their competitive advantage shrinks.
Not really. Perhaps they know enough about this that they believe it wouldn't work. How much would you pay for Firefox per year? How many people would pay that figure?
We always see the decisions that blow up, but we dont notice the thousands of decisions nobody cares about. Sometimes it really does look like just another minor feature request at coding time.
Agreed in general, disagreed in the specific Mozilla case. They’re an internet-related company where “privacy” is one of the stated core goals, yet they’ve stuck their foot in their mouth so often they could open a shoe shop. Failing to see this one is at best incompetence.
"We should have communicated more" seems like a passive-aggressive way of saying "Oh, you poor simpletons... We should have talked slower, used more, simple words, and been more persuasive. We failed to properly explain why you're wrong. If only we did that, you'd more readily accept what we're giving you."
Please. This is never about learning and better communication. This is universal corporate English for: "you got us, but we really don't give a flying ef and we will fulfill our goals step by step - no matter what you say".
Oh maaaaaaaaaaaan do I despise hearing variations on this "non-pology."
It's never "Wow, we fucked up by doing something harmful to you." It's always, "My bad, I failed to explain exactly why you're wrong to think this is harming you. I take total responsibility for not explaining why this is actually good for you. I'll try again."
One possibility is they knew there would be an outcry but estimated that the loss in user support because of it would be limited enough that the upside of having the majority of users with the setting left on wins.
The problem we currently have with cookie banners is thanks to the browser vendors not caring about it.
An API could exist which a page can query, where the user has already pre-selected how they want to deal with cookies. For example reject all but the essential ones, reject none at all, reject some, according to certain criteria.
Even more, the browser could check if the page is adhering to the user's expectations, and if it doesn't, block it for a period of time, like a week or a month, and publish the fact that they ignored the user's wishes.
Possibly also give the user a signed document which claims that this page did not respect the user's privacy expectations, so that the user can use it in court.
These should be solvable problems.
This requirement to constantly ask the user while using these dark patterns is what makes normal people just give up and "accept".
If the page is expected to ask the browser which preferences the user has set regarding the cookies, then this problem is gone, because the page no longer is expected to ask a person via a popup.
So I guess that both the user and the site can't get what they want and we should scrap the internet.
If it wouldn't work, then I'd see no ads in my paper-based iX subscription, yet it is full of ads even though I'm paying for that paper.
But the paper has the benefit that the ads I see there don't collect information on me. This is what I want the internet to be.
Ads OK, but no tracking of me if I don't want it (which I express via cookies when in a browser).
Also, you should note how greedy these companies are that they show you the paywall after you have consented to the cookies in order to read the article. No hint on that accepting the cookies is only useful if you also have a subscription. When you can't read the article, they don't revert the setting of the cookies, but just pretend that they gave you access to the article and keep the cookies around for days or years.
It's not. Tracking leads to better targeting which leads to higher conversion ratios and overall higher "Cost Per 1000 Impressions" (CPM).
If you simply do "contextual" targeting, so targeting based on the page content, your CPM will go down and and the publisher will lose money.
> Also, you should note how greedy these companies are that they show you the paywall after you have consented to the cookies in order to read the article
Depends on the company. News media publishers use the same system but are usually barely profitable if at all.
> Also, you should note how greedy these companies are that they show you the paywall after you have consented to the cookies in order to read the article. No hint on that accepting the cookies is only useful if you also have a subscription. When you can't read the article, they don't revert the setting of the cookies, but just pretend that they gave you access to the article and keep the cookies around for days or years.
The EU Court of Law decided that offering a subscription or mandate for cookies to be enabled is not legal as an offer. So the transactional nature you propose is currently not allowed. What is allowed is a grey area which has yet to be explored.
So, actually, users and sites both had what they wanted, just not corporations.
However not all content can be produced this way, news or sports coverage would be an example.
Is it just me that sometimes get the feeling that when companies have to explain them selves with this amoubt of text, they actually know that they are doing something wrong but are trying to cover it up by these long and unnecessary explanations?
That's what most of folks says in this sub-tree
> "there are enormous economic incentives for advertisers to try to bypass these countermeasures"
Then:
> We’ve been collaborating with Meta on this
Given Meta's track record with scooping up just about any personal data they can find, it's pretty obvious that this is just going to be yet another datapoint in Meta's collection.
It shows that the topic is merely now considered as a technical point, rather than a principal-based one.
Mozilla is a joke nowadays.
Data is their edge. It's how they compete with each other.
The privacy "arms race" isn't just between the browser vendors and the trackers, it's also between tracker a and tracker b.
Giving them a new data point (no matter how """privacy preserving""" it is) is just that, another data point. It's not going to make them give up on the others.
I don't believe in cooperation with an industry that has shown no remorse with tracking users at all. That will not be successful. Advertisers will employ this and still track. And it is possible to not get tracked and deliver false data, even today.
The arms race will continue as it does today, but advertisers will have yet another avenue to exploit in the form of the attribution API.
I suppose it shows who's paying Mozilla.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
Found it. Go to settings, type privacy into the search box. The last item under "Firefox Data Collection and Use" is a check box labelled "Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement".
It was already unchecked on mine when I looked just now.
I know of no workaround short of installing from the Beta or Nightly channel.
source: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/firefox-for-android-abo...
And then you can go to the normal about:config and set dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled to false
Only then is PPA actually off (apparently, I did not manage to test this yet but someone did confirm the default setting is true). Not cool. Especially because Mozilla provides instructions for the desktop version on their site but doesn't even mention the mobile version at all.
128.0 (Build #2016030615)
Wonder why this is even an issue.
And it felt kinda good, i actually thought that Firefox was different and a part of "the good guys", now it doesn't feel that way anymore. Sigh.
Maybe one day we'll have a usable FOSS browser but I doubt it (the companies will fight tooth and nail against it including legal means, buying out companies, blocking content for them, etc.).
open chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml, set general.aboutConfig.enable to true
open about:config, set dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled to false
dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled
programs.firefox.policies.Preferences."dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled" = false;
I guess the question is whether the aggregation services can be persuaded by clever attribute manipulation to give the ad site a near unique report for a user across many sites.
<https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attr...>
<https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-ppm-dap>
<https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experime...>
Before anyone tries to respond with it. It is https://donorbox.org/ladybird
EDIT : Actually they still update it. Last version is 115.
I get it and I like the idea but it does make for a difficult up front experience.
It is not ready, to be a public browser.
Regardless, from what I've gathered, Ladybird is going to ship of theseus their way into memory safety. It's not announced what the C++ replacement language will be, but they are working towards that.
You can make a free web browser from Firefox's current engine just as easily as from Servo, I would fund the person who does that.
Or, if one dreams for a moment, if slower becomes the norm, web apps will have to become less complicated. Fast seems to just enable more and more ad tech
Let's build something that is Ad resistant from the start. Something that uses native technologies.
Edit: We need something that does not need backing of large corporations or huge funding to access the web.
Internet was always simple. We have become over dependent on browsers and http stack.
I would use it to read my rss feeds. I'm sure we could make Hacker News discussions work. My mastodon feed could probably work too. That's 90% of my browser usage right there.
Just imagine how pleasant it would be to browse and navigate. Would be so fast, so responsive.
I really like https://geminiprotocol.net/ but I think they went too far removing images, sounds, video, and forms.
Still a long way to go if that is to happen on the web.
Some older protocols such as IRC, NNTP, Gopher, and email (especially plain text email and not HTML email), is one thing to be usable.
There are also some newer protocols and file formats for some uses, e.g.: Gemini protocol/file-format, Scorpion protocol/file-format, Spartan protocol (which uses the same file format as Gemini, although with an extra link type), Nightfall Express (probably the simplest one, although this means that virtual hosting will not be avavilable), and perhaps some others.
(One thing I have read somewhere (I cannot find it now) is three rules for making such a "small web" protocol: (1) Don't make it a subset; (2) Don't make it compatible; (3) Make it better for everyone (authors, readers, programmers, etc). They also discussed separation of "document web" from "application web"; I agree with that too, although of course there is the consideration of how such a separation should be working. I have ideas about this, and I believe my own designs do follow these three rules better than Gemini and Spartan do.)
I had written my own list of what "small web" protocols/file-formats that I am aware of: scorpion://zzo38computer.org/smallweb.txt (which was originally posted to Usenet, although it has been updated since then) One way to access this file would be a command such as:
echo 'R scorpion://zzo38computer.org/smallweb.txt' | nc zzo38computer.org 1517 | less
Another proposal is the following suggestion to make a "small web browser": gemini://xavi.privatedns.org/small-web-browser.gmi (the document I linked above describes how to access this file in case you don't know) I agree with some of the points made but disagree with others; I will comment about some of these points later. (However, you could use some of these ideas for the HTTP/HTML part of a multi-protocol browser.)
I do not believe that just using this existing HTTP/HTML is the way to do it (and other people also agree with me about this), although it is one way to do it, and can be combined with others.
Such a "small web" browser could be designed to support multiple protocols and file formats. So, in addition to HTTP(S), also Gopher, Gemini, Spartan, Scorpion, Nex, local files, and possibly NNTP (although this would not be as good as a dedicated news reader software, it would at least allow to read articles from a NNTP server without needing to set up your dedicated NNTP client software; Lynx also supports NNTP).
> While I do think HTTP/1.1 is good enough for most tasks [...] there are several aspects that I do not particularly like: Cookies, User agent, Referer, Etag, Cross-origin requests
I do not like these features much either. HTTP/1.1 still is good enough for many tasks, although it is still messy in some ways and more complicated than it could be, although for the purpose of accessing services that use HTTP, it will be good enough for this purpose (which is what the article describes doing). (One feature of HTTP that I think is useful that Gemini, Spartan, and Gopher lack (but Scorpion does not lack) is Range requests, although that isn't that useful for a browser and is more useful for a download manager (including command-line programs such as curl). Multiple ranges in a single request seems an unnecessarily complexity to me, though.)
> Support a small subset of HTTP/1.1, supporting GET/POST, while effectively removing support for most HTTP headers.
Agree. (You could also suppport adding arbitrary extra headers by user configuration; e.g. the user could specify that they want to add a "Accept-Language" header or a "DNT" header or whatever other arbitrary headers they might want.)
> Support a subset of HTML5, so that embedded images, audio and video are possible.
Mostly agree. Embedded images would be useful to be able to switch on/off by the user; if off then they appear as links. Embedded audio/video is probably not useful at all; I would have <audio> and <video> commands to be displayed as a list of links (the audio/video can be viewed if you follow the links).
> Support modern CSS, possibly leaving deprecated or complex features out.
I would probably leave out most of the features, although you do not necessarily have to do so. However, important would be to allow disabling CSS (and ensure that "complying with the requirements above" (see below) means that it is guaranteed to work correctly if the user chooses to disable CSS).
> Support NO JavaScript at all, as JavaScript is one of the main sources of complexity behind a modern web browser, and is typically abused for user fingerprinting.
Agree.
> Mandate the use of TLS-encrypted connections.
Disagree. Encrypted and unencrypted connections are both useful (and the URI scheme would distinguish them; this allows end users to easily filter out any sites that do not support encryption from their local index).
> Allow integration with SOCKS5 proxies e.g.: Tor.
Agree, although in addition to this, it is also sometimes useful to be able to use local programs as proxies and to have the proxy to handle TLS (although there is some complication in handling client certificates when doing so).
> Provide passwordless authentication via client certificates, and always ask for user authorization beforehand.
Agree, with both parts. (Passwords might still be implemented too (although if you don't want to, then you don't have to); HTTP has a "Authorization" header for this purpose, and Scorpion also supports something similar (in addition to supporting client certificates if the connection is encrypted).) It will be necessary to ensure that the user can command the browser to log out at any time (both with passwords and with client certificates).
> Provide a local index of sites complying with the requirements above, so that sites can be found without the use of an external search engine. [...] Such index can be updated from third-parties, similarly to package managers like APT.
I think it is a good idea.
> Custom providers can be easily added by users, so the network remains decentralised.
This is important if you are doing the above. (Being able to manually adjust the index is also helpful; see the next paragraph for why this is helpful.)
In addition to this, there is another possibility of alternate service index; in case of a link to an unsupported service (i.e. one not in the index), it can interpret it using an alternate service (e.g. to a plain HTML version of Twitter or Mastodon, or a Gemini service that displays a proxied news article, etc). In some cases, it may be able to try to figure out from the retrieved HTML or HTTP response headers, e.g. if it is a Mastodon instance. Other times the user might manually specify them when viewing them.
> Sites accessible from it can still be accessed from traditional web browsers.
OK. (If you follow my multi-protocol suggestion above, then this is not always the case; I think it is useful to have multiple ways, and this is one of them.)
> It provides guarantees on a subset of features from the modern web that do not harm users.
OK.
> Users do no longer have to worry on inspecting which websites can be trusted, as such guarantees would be provided by the browser.
This is very helpful.
> It allows reusing existing tools, both web browsers and servers.
Yes, although it is not always desirable for several reasons, e.g. for testing compatibility. (Sometimes it is desirable, though.)
> Because of the smaller set of features, it also leads to simpler code, allowing more implementations to flourish over time.
This is also helped by my suggestion to require that it works correctly if the user chooses to disable CSS.
It additionally links to a "Native Web" document. I disagree with those ideas. It is not necessarily to only allow AGPL3, since it is possible to have source code available in such a way that is compatible with AGPL3 in other ways (e.g. public domain source code without patent restrictions etc). I would use uxn/varvara which is much simpler to implement, also being more portable and avoiding the other disadvantages listed there, but it is also not as "powerful" system and not native code, so is a different disadvantage. About hardware access, I think that it should not request hardware access but only e.g. if you request audio input, the user can specify a microphone or another program or an existing audio file etc. (Solving this also can be done in my way of designing a new operating system with "proxy capabilities"; such a system could run inside of other systems as well as stand-alone, and can run native code as well as being able to emulate non-native instruction sets, so that is another way to solve it, although it is more complicated than using uxn/varvara.)
Things are progressing faster than you'd think.
Doesn't make it certain, but it is a good foundation to be working from.
Here's the Servo link: https://servo.org/sponsorship/
Short term, deshittify Firefox. Mid term move to some like Lady bird. Long term, if Lady bird is corrupted, start on browser replacement number 2.
Alternatively, the hardest step of just walking away for heavy internet usage I guess.
And fallback to Firefox when things don't work. Which is usually on sketchy websites, websites that have heavy bot protection and fingerprinting or ones that use gpu APIs.
* There is no legal entity behind the project. Should anything ever happen with the project (it can happen, even if unlikely), there are no legal ramifications.
* The binaries aren't signed. Yes, code signing is a bit of a racket, but there is some merit in it.
* There is no auto-update mechanism. Might not seem like a big deal, but IMO it is, especially on Windows where you're recommended to rely on 3rd party client to update the browser for you. You've now added a middle man, and since the binaries are not signed... well there's no guarantee you aren't downloading a malicious binary.
To me, this seems like a plus. If you want users to update, provide them with something worth updating to. This tracking suddenly being enabled for a ton of users is the very result of automatic updates.
Mozilla has been repeatedly resetting "Always check if Firefox is your default browser" option to "yes" with upgrades. I don't see why "private-attribution submission enabled" wouldn't be reset in future in the same way.
> Mozilla has been repeatedly resetting "Always check if Firefox is your default browser" option to "yes" with upgrades.
I'm sorry to say this, but this just seems to be misinformation.
I don't see that anywhere in the source code[1]? Anything I can find regarding prompting the user regarding the default browser is hidden behind an if guard to make sure the pref is `true` and not `false`.
The only scenarios I am aware of that will change the pref if the user has toggled one manually is the `_migrationUI`[2] function (as you can see, no changes relating to `browser.shell.checkDefaultBrowser`). Otherwise, untoggled prefs will be changed if the value in `firefox.js`[3] or `all.js`[4] is changed. As you can see, the last time the pref was modified was 2004.
[1] https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/search?q=browser.shell...
[2] https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/compone...
[3] https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/diff/94ff451885bb94679...
[4] https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/modules/libpref...
I would also say a web browser should be the one piece of software constantly updated due to the sheer volume of security patches issued every few weeks.
Doesn't matter. I don't inherently trust any organization.
>They are already the custodians of custom settings and making the choice for you, so it doesn't seem like a valid comparison here.
I can make the choice to install software. I should be able to make the choice to upgrade it as I choose as well.
If I buy a chair from Crate+Barrel, I have given them the choice of designing and manufacturing that chair and all the decisions that went into it. But I do not give Crate+Barrel the choice of sneaking into my house and swapping it with some newer version of the chair that 51% of the population liked slightly better after 5 minutes of testing or that they think will make them more money somehow.
I think that's completely valid.
I was just assuming (maybe incorrectly?) we're talking about what should be happening in general (so what the experience for the layman should be). Now whether that applies to Librewolf is another story, but arguably it becoming fairly known, it should.
Side-note: In Waterfox, I've re-added the ability to disable auto-updating completely. I completely understand the want to manually update software.
In app update prompts work for me, they have a TOS / Legal Entity it seems. They broke away from Startpage in recentish years.
Plenty of feature trade offs to compare though with Librefox.
> Plenty of feature trade offs to compare though with Librefox.
Yes, for sure. Definitively different goal alignments.
A UK Ltd. is less transparent than Librewolf, an open-source project run by many volunteers without the incentive to make any money.
Point 3 is no longer true, the installer comes with the option to enable auto-update and on Linux, it also auto-updates, depending on distro, etc.
The risks you are talking about are not inherent to Librewolf, but to Linux and open-source, and thus are not legitimate criticisms of Librewolf.
Genuinely, why not? Open source projects go through ownership changes (as unlikely as they may be), social engineering, etc. In the unlikely chance something were to happen and anything malicious were to occur, what recourse is a user to have? And we are talking about a web browser here, which will be accessing peoples most sensitive data. I don't think this is an unreasonable stance.
> A UK Ltd. is less transparent than Librewolf, an open-source project run by many volunteers without the incentive to make any money.
Well this UK Ltd is still beholden to English law and UK GDPR. You could argue the merits and teeth that GDPR has, but I don't see why it's not a valid comparison? I can't just start processing personal data without complying with GDPR, for example.
> The risks you are talking about are not inherent to Librewolf, but to Linux and open-source, and thus are not legitimate criticisms of Librewolf.
Linux has the Linux foundation, which AFAIK is going to be beholden to California law? I don't see how that can't also be a criticism of Librewolf (and any OSS in a similar spot?).
> Point 3 is no longer true, the installer comes with the option to enable auto-update and on Linux, it also auto-updates, depending on distro, etc.
It seems to me to still true, because the installer is installing WinUpdater. Which, as it seems, is maintained by an individual developer?
> If you want LibreWolf to be automatically updated (recommended), you can choose to install the LibreWolf WinUpdater[1], which is included in the installer.
Chrome on the other hand (and believe me I despise Google in so many different ways) has consistently been okay. Not great, but okay, and certainly better than Firefox. This while having the same browsing, tab and extension habits in both browsers.
With comments like my original above I've always seen a bunch of people come out with all sorts of caveats defending or justifying FF, but personal experience has consistently shown me differently.
1. Define some baseline set of M impressions with various ad identifiers and from various sybil advertisers.
2. For each target user, define some set of M marker impressions, also with various ad identifiers and from various and sybil advertisers.
3. Save all impressions (marker + baseline) on a bunch of sybil browsers to get above the reporting baseline with some probability.
4. If/when a target user visits a target website, request a conversion report for each ad/advertiser.
You now have a baseline signal (from the baseline ads/advertisers) and a marker signal (from the marker ads/advertisers). If this is one of your target users, you'd expect their "marker" signal signal to be stronger than the baseline.
Might be worth opening an issue if you believe there's merit to the attack?
And I'm now quite sure this system is insecure. Fundamentally, either:
1. There is some magical sybil protection: An attacker can only spend their own privacy budget without affecting the rest of the system.
2. The system can be saturated: An attacker can spend everyone's privacy budget.
3. The system is not private: An attacker can exceed the "safe" privacy budget by combining information from multiple sybils.
Also, another assumption, but it’s that doc still builds upon the W3C proposal - would it not be worth raising as an issue in the repo? Seems to still be active.
I've filed an issue at https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/ipa/issues/90 but I'm still not sure if that's the right repo.
Everything else is just agreeing with the advertising industry on their idea that profile-building is fine.
These advertisers nowadays think they have they are entitled to everything, and Firefox just helped them.
All the other images are hosted by Wikipedia themselves and are not ad-related, so I don't see where's the issue here.
If a browser wants to be strict about what it loads, most of the web would appear broken. Maybe google could have the weight to force such change, but no way could mozilla impose such a strict rule.
The value of words is leaving the web.
The "ad industry" is a cancer and we need legal protection against this "industry". The solution is political not technical and definitely can not be left to "the market".
Haven't you had enough?
What you say sounds reasonable. And I'm not trying to say "well, it's impossible because of some current status quo", because we could change that.
What I'm trying to say is that we need this "industry" to work out the practicalities. Otherwise we are "protected" in a same way the GDPR protects us against 3rd part trackers (you don't need a cookie banner if you don't allow 3rd parties to track your users. Yet here we are...)
Done.
But I highly doubt it removes the want for private data, though. Tracking is also there to measure performance, do AB tests, etc etc.
I'm sure such a broad sweeping law would solve some. But it won't make the ad industry suddenly "good" or go away, or get purged or such.
Hopefully, the vacuum of people needing to know things would result in better independent Product reviews.
And the vacuum of not spending 30% of your company budget on advertising would hopefully lead to sinking prices and people being more willing to spend on things that were previously funded by advertising.
That already misses a huge problem though, I don't pay Mozilla for Firefox and I don't pay most online sites and services that gobble up my data and sell it off.
I may have misunderstood you, but my read on the third paragraph was mainly that Firefox, in this case, could still have a free browser that collects and sells data. That rule would just add one more fsctor for them to consider if they ever want a paid browser, they both need a viable market and be willing to give up the option to sell data.
Personally, I am open to an argument that any legislation is folly. But we need to raise the discourse rather than just bash legislative failures (or merely partial successes) of the past.
My point was specifically that the GDPR put a law in place that when you send private data from users to third parties, you must ask the user for permission and allow that user to decline this and then not send that users' private data to these third parties.
The idea and intention and hope is clear: that site/app/platform owners don't send/sell data to other parties. Or, if they still do so, are punished by having to nag users with popups/banners etc.
The ad industry then spun this around, ensured that virtually every site nags users (mitigating that punishment), continue harvesting data exactly like before, and -above all- pursuade the general public that "the EU is forcing you to click cookie banners all day" or similar double-speak.
With which I was trying to put forward that any legislation must be a lot better than what the GDPR did here. So as to avoid being circumvented by the industry and also hated by the public.
So if company X sells data to company Y and then Y sells to company Z then company X has full liability for leaks or misuse from all entities in the chain.
No more free credit monitoring. Banks, credit card companies, and end users get to directly sue these companies. May not completely solve it but you can try to make it so expensive to mine data you don’t truly need that it ends the whole industry.
I am sure there are holes in this but we can at least try to kill the data brokers and bad actors.
EDIT: forgot to mention consumers don’t need to care much for this to be effective. If there are damages to be had law firms are incentivized to file class action lawsuits and recruit affected customers. So, there is an incentivized actor within this framework to do the leg work to get a big payday.
That likely would end up just being case law rather than legislation. Meaning, a lawsuit can be filed for it today and its up to the courts to decide if that liability is reasonable.
The bad people will change the API, lock the bootloader, implement a problematic standard (ACPI, SecureBoot) or add more DRM.
We cannot solve political issues (law) with technical solutions (programming). If we don’t like locked iPhones, the solution is a law. If we don’t like tracking, the solution is a law. But the EU Cookie-Directive of failed? Because malicious compliance, they made a business case out of it instead of ending it (cookies for logins are fine). And if we want public APIs, local computing and open-source the solutions are laws.
The FSF uses the law :)
Let us go a step further, change it.
At least on my Debian I retain full control using the shim and my own enrolled keys. So seems less an issue with the technology but perhaps with how some vendors (that are already locking you in anyway) use secureboot?
from https://wiki.debian.org/SecureBoot
>> Shim then becomes the root of trust for all the other distro-provided UEFI programs. It embeds a further distro-specific CA key that is itself used for as a trust root for signing further programs (e.g. Linux, GRUB, fwupdate). This allows for a clean delegation of trust - the distros are then responsible for signing the rest of their packages. Shim itself should ideally not need to be updated very often, reducing the workload on the central auditing and CA teams.
Not surprising, given the huge role Microsoft had in developing this.
You can't enroll your MOK without booting up, and you can't boot up if Microsoft hasn't signed your bootloader/kernel... It used to be an no-brainer and now its difficult.
only using self verifying of PCRs is not an effective protecting against most attacks. (Against which a secure boot chain is supposed to help.)
Sure it depends a bit on what you want from secure boot. But in general if you need PCRs you also need to make sure only verified code can run. If you don't, you likely don't need PCRs either, and some simple flawed secure module key storage would work as good.
In a certain way having a trust verification of the boot loader is the most important part. Everything after that depends on how the boot loader is implemented, through having PCRs is still helpful.
Through this is where secure boot failed (very hard), as long as you don't enroll your own keys you are not really getting a secure boot chain. Something which IMHO is fundamental requirement for any company laptops and similar. (Or, instead of using custom PKs, you are MS and disable all 3rd party keys and disable any BIOS option to add/enroll 3rd party keys, like they did on some older ARM devices).
I.e. IMHO a secure boot chain and protocols related to it are a must have, but the current implementation is garbage, especially for most Windows users.
If you want to know in which direction things could be done you could look a ARM Mac Books more specifically the documentation Asahi Linux created for it. Through just the direction not the exact design.
Basically for PCs (even in huge companies with MDA) you don't need global trust chains, just local per-system trust automatically setup on first boot after "reset" and making sure a "reset" is roughly like a wipe (by using full disk encryption) is all you need (and want). The devil is in the details, but it isn't really that hard to make it work.
And the GPL is dying. Every year fewer projects are maintained under the GPL standard. Violations abound anyway. The MIT License and other permissive licenses; or commercially restrictive licenses like the SSPL, are the new go-to; because the GPL didn’t think about SaaS or “Tivoization” until it was too late.
Does connecting a AGPL-licensed database to your website make your whole website AGPL? What is the line between an innocent connection, or a viral integration?
What happens if you add a proprietary protocol to the database specifically for your app? Do you need to open source it, if that database is/isn’t publicly accessible? Why wouldn’t it be considered? Your project dependencies certainly aren’t directly publicly available, yet you agree the AGPL applies there.
Some have quoted the FSF about how “internal data structures” should be the distinction. But even that is something a lawyer could seriously bend - is JSON from your database, that only your app understands, such a structure?
The license is ridiculously vague in this regard. Not that it matters anyway - almost all of the big AGPL projects offer alternative proprietary licenses to paying customers, so it’s really more of a source available license.
> Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software. This Corresponding Source shall include the Corresponding Source for any work covered by version 3 of the GNU General Public License that is incorporated pursuant to the following paragraph.
> Does connecting a AGPL-licensed database to your website make your whole website AGPL?
The user doesn't interact with the database, so no. Since the app server is not linking to the database, it also isn't subject to the AGPL from that direction.
> What is the line between an innocent connection, or a viral integration?
Exactly the same as the GPL, since that section has not changed.
> What happens if you add a proprietary protocol to the database specifically for your app? Do you need to open source it, if that database is/isn’t publicly accessible?
If the user can access the database, you must provide them with the combined source code under the AGPL. If the user cannot access the database, you do not need to do anything.
> Why wouldn’t it be considered? Your project dependencies certainly aren’t directly publicly available, yet you agree the AGPL applies there.
You are linking against those dependencies. Therefore the whole work is under the AGPL, through the same mechanism as the GPL. Now that the entire work is under the AGPL, you must provide users who access it over the network the source code.
> Some have quoted the FSF about how “internal data structures” should be the distinction.
See this is a real source of ambiguity. But it is an ambiguity that applies to every *GPL license, not just the AGPL. But it's really not as big of a deal as you make it out to be, using the documented public network APIs obviously is not linking.
Because you are not a lawyer. The points I’ve made have been cited by actual lawyers. Your opinion as a technologist blinds you to the degree of legal ambiguity.
https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...
https://writing.kemitchell.com/2021/01/24/Reading-AGPL
Also, the very fact that these opinions exist shows this license is not safe. There’s never a correct interpretation that will perfectly win the day eventually, only rulings. As the AGPL has never been in court before, things could quickly go sideways.
As my second link, written by an actual lawyer, puts it: “Inebriated aliens might as well have beamed it down from space as a kind of practical joke.”
If you have some background knowledge of Google's architecture, this explains exactly why the AGPL is banned there: all code is built from one monorepo where everything is linked together.
> https://writing.kemitchell.com/2021/01/24/Reading-AGPL
This completely agrees with what I said. At it's core, the A part of the AGPL only kicks in if:
> “you modify the Program” and > “your [modified] version supports such interaction [remotely through a computer network]”
Yes he calls out various potential problems and a potential loophole, but those same problems are also present in the regular GPL!
I observed a friend of mine click on a malicious ad link recently in front of me when driving a presentation for a community meeting. It was shown as an overlay for a seemingly harmless site I found. In my home with a pihole I didn't see any of the ads.
I felt terrible that I was partially responsible for her clicking it. This knowledge and habit of ad-blocking and secure computer usage takes factors of time, effort, and money to learn, and not everyone is going to, or is capable of, devoting what's needed.
People forget that before ad-supported "free" services took over we had community-run actually free services.
The internet does not need ads.
Absolutely true, but how do you expect that to happen or come about?
Rampant advertising is similar to the copyright law problem. The majority of users may not like what's happening but their opposition and or dislike is but mild so when it comes to political action it collectively amounts to little more than nought.
On the other hand, advertisers, like copyright holders, have strong vested interests thus are highly motivated to ensure politicians act in their favor (one only has to look at the lopsidedness of lobbying interests to see that).
The real enemy is indifference, as a whole the citizenry is not motivated enough for things to change. Simply, we have ourselves to blame.
In the same manner through which legal protection for various other matters have come about. By raising awareness, sharing thoughts and solutions, and organizing.
More laws and larger governments doesn't have to be the answer to all problems. If consumers care enough they'll change their usage, if they don't change their usage they likely don't care enough.
I don't particularly have an issue with advertising itself. If adverts get on my nerves on a product or page I just leave, as you suggest: problem solved.
The actual issue is the stalky tracking of me throughout my life that is currently inseparable from the advertising. I can't just walk away from that: it happens behind my back, it has happened before I get the chance to walk away.
> can stop using whatever product has been ruined by ads
Which will not stop the stalky behaviour of the ad industry. They'll still track me if I happen to click the wrong thing, or track me through my connections to other people. I suppose I could walk away from life and become a hermit, but that would be just a little extreme.
> or find ways to remove the advertising.
Which is, while I do take part, an ultimately fruitless task. Every block we make for the stalky behaviour, be it technical or legislative (other than outright banning the tracking of personal data except with explicit opt-in without exceptions, and properly enforcing punishments for breaking the ban), they'll find a way around. Removing it is not a long term solution, it is a war or attrition where we have to have our guard up all the time and they only have to get lucky, or just be particularly sneaky, every now and again.
> More laws and larger governments doesn't have to be the answer to all problems.
This has often been said by companies and their shills. Oddly, they are all in favour of extra laws and government reach when it is, for example, to protect what they consider to be their intellectual property.
You could make some real progress without being a hermit though, it doesn't have to be all or nothing. Don't use a smartphone, limit as much of your time online as you can, and pay in cash when you can. Those wouldn't make you a hermit but would seriously limit the data you make available to be gobbled up in the first place.
> This has often been said by companies and their shills. Oddly, they are all in favour of extra laws and government reach when it is, for example, to protect what they consider to be their intellectual property.
Well that's actually what I see as a better approach, remove protections for those companies and industries rather than trying to create new laws to limit them. Its a strange balancing act to attempt to both protect and limit an industry with different laws, we would be better off not doing either.
Vaguely referencing more laws or larger government doesn't mean anything. We're not talking about all problems but a specific one. There is an obvious imbalance between the power and information an individual consumer can use to shield themselves from activities by companies that are detrimental to them. We are also not expected to test our own food for toxins.
More platitudes and soundbites doesn't have to be the answer to all problems.
> Almost all websites have been tailored to include ads and hide information. You're tracked on all devices you touch.
That's really the crux of it though. The problem isn't just that companies are gobbling up all this data, it's also that we make the data available in the first place.
Stop using a smartphone and taking it everywhere with you, limit what you do online in general, and pay cash when you can. A few simple changes would really reduce the data you make available, I'm sure there are other simple changes I'm missing here but the point is that we don't have to protect data that doesn't exist.
I honestly do not think it is possible to ignore ads unless you do not see/smell/hear/experience them. Even if you dismiss them, you have received an impression of that ad. Your mind has been affected. It just happens that we normalized it as a normal function of society ( not completely unlike how we normalized cameras everywhere including on doorbell ). I have no interest in dating farmers, but I still remember being exposed to farmers only ad.
edit:
<< Stop using a smartphone and taking it everywhere with you.
It seems less and less of an option. Amtrak gatekeeps its best prices behind an app. Parking lot wants me to use an app. My workplace now effectively forced me to have phone on me ( even if I come into office.. I can understand the need for it while remote ).
The current societal construct practically requires a smartphone. You could technically go on without it the same way you COULD technically not have a car. It is possible, but very, very limiting. And I would argue that not having a car now is way more forgiving than not having a cell and that is saying something.
While we can't avoid seeing ads in a public place, we can manage how we respond to them. That's really not much different than not liking what someone else says. We can try to regulate everything such that people can be comfortable and never have to build a thick skin, or we can trust that people can and should be able to manage their emotions well enough to ignore things they don't like.
> It seems less and less of an option. Amtrak gatekeeps its best prices behind an app. Parking lot wants me to use an app. My workplace now effectively forced me to have phone on me ( even if I come into office.. I can understand the need for it while remote
I can't stand when companies do this stuff, assuming that everyone has a smartphone and is willing to give them access to it. I choose not to patronize companies that do it, but yeah that's harder when your office building requires a smartphone to enter. When push comes to shove, I wonder what the employer would say if someone raised that it isn't an option for them and they need a different way to enter.
Broadly, we have a real issue today with society allowing conveniences to become necessities. We do it to ourselves, but just because smartphones and cars are convenient doesn't mean we should build a world where everyone has to have them. It locks us into certain paths, and when concerns like climate change come up for example we're hamstrung because we can't imagine giving up things like personal vehicles, air travel, smartphones, etc.
Just for a different perspective, I can't ignore them. I read more-or-less all text that comes into my field of vision, and cannot help but look at bright flashing lights. To my knowledge this isn't recognized anywhere as a disability (though it is associated with a standard diagnosis).
For me, and presumably others like me, flashing road signs that tell me I'm driving the right speed thanks are a serious dustraction even though I've seen the same one hundreds of times. I stopped watching association football when animated sideline ads became common because I could mot focus on the game.
If it makes sense to put in wheelchair ramps at the stadium couldn't it make sense to accommodate me, even if most people can redirect their attention just as easily as walking up the stairs?
I have the same issue, and I strongly suspect it has to do with my ADHD. I absolutely hate ads in pretty much all forms.
In general, it is a really tough line to draw what is considered a protected disability. I don't know where I would draw the line, and it just gets harder as we create more diagnoses. I don't mean that to demonize the diagnoses at all, but it does make drawing a line for what to legally protect that much harder.
Sure. A phone is a product, it isn't a right or necessity. I get that they are very convenient, and addictive, but they're a very new novelty on the scale of a legal system. There are good arguments for wanting to limit advertising and data privacy, but protecting our right to use a certain piece of technology really just isn't very compelling IMO.
> close your eyes
Advertising is nothing new though. If your concern is even just seeing ads at all, that's a problem that has existed much longer than digital data brokers.
> stay offline
Similar to smartphones, being online isn't a right and is a very new concept. We don't have to be online to live our lives, and we shouldn't expect that everyone is online.
> just move bro
Moving isn't easy, and may not be cheap depending on how you do it, but is there really something wrong with moving when you don't like the area you live in? To me that seems like a totally reasonable response for anyone that's able, and for those that aren't willing to move they can try to change the place they live. Moving is just easier than somehow convincing a locality to limit or remove advertising.
tldr: Some of us are tired of fiddling with things where were we shouldn't have to.
<< More laws and larger governments doesn't have to be the answer to all problems.
If market participants can't behave ( and they clearly can't help themselves ), it is the only real answer.
<< If consumers care enough they'll change their usage, if they don't change their usage they likely don't care enough.
Or.. options for consumers are limited, which affects what they do. In all seriousness, streaming execs seemed to admit the ads simply bring more money for them so they don't care if non-ad version is profitable. It is not enough.
My household dropped Netflix and Prime over their silliness. We currently still have Disney until they get too greedy. And that is just streaming. Regular net is soooo much worse without a way to scrub the ads away.
Isn't that a good example of consumers exercising their right to not patronize companies they don't agree with? You didn't need a law stopping you from using Prime, and you don't have a right to use it, you just decided you didn't like their product anymore.
The blindspot missing in a ban of advertising is what that does to the viability and price of a product. Prime and Netflix as it is today is built based partly on the advertising revenue. Presumably if that money disappears the product would get worse, disappear, or become more expensive.
Hmm, there are ways: I browse with NoScript and unlock Origin installed and see almost no ads. If a website doesn't work and I really need to visit it for some reason, I selectively enable part of the JS they want me to load. Other sites simply don't get my attention.
[1]https://www.pcmag.com/news/rip-ublock-origin-google-proceeds...
More laws and larger governments are generally undesirable (for obvious reasons) but saying that we shouldn't make any laws at all is throwing the baby out of the bathwater.
If you're thoughtful and deliberate about how you write your legislation, you can have a disproportionately positive impact with a very small amount of additional weight.
For instance, instead of trying to enumerate every single way that data could be leaked and forbid that (see: HIPAA), you should just make the end state (PII in the hands of someone the user didn't explicitly authorize it to be in) illegal and mandate a fine per unit of information (e.g. 1% of the median US salary for SSN) to every entity in the leak chain (because a chain of custody for personal information is just about mandatory at this point).
Details will vary, but this general approach is vastly better than the crazy laws we have in other areas that attempt to "enumerate badness" in the intermediate rather than the end state.
> If you're thoughtful and deliberate about how you write your legislation, you can have a disproportionately positive impact with a very small amount of additional weight.
Unfortunately that really is a non-starter in the US today. I have very little faith that Congress is interested in carefully considering and clarifying. I have even less faith that any bill with thousands of pages of text, which is how they appear to do business these days, could ever be clearly defined and scoped to avoid obvious unintended consequences or misplaced boundaries.
What would these political solutions achieve that aren’t achievable instantly today via technical solutions?
Most people don’t care about what the ad industry is doing.
I agree that something needs to be done about the ad industry and rampant data collection, but your emotionally manipulative comments are not it, and actively make it harder to discuss solutions to the problem.
> The "ad industry" is a cancer and we need legal protection against this "industry".
Emotional pleading, charged language, snuck premises.
> The solution is political not technical and definitely can not be left to "the market".
Obvious political pandering/dogwhistling.
> Haven't you had enough?
Obvious call to action.
Throughout the whole comment, zero logic or reasoning, zero useful information, zero actual solutions presented.
This comment is devoid of any value whatsoever and completely inappropriate for HN.
I wouldn't even want this on Reddit.
At least ublock origin makes that easy, but it's still ridiculous.
On the bright side, French courts have ruled that this kind of cookie popup is illegal under the GDPR so maybe they'll slowly be destroyed
As with this kind of regulations, we now have to wait for the law suits to target a few select large companies, then the courts to reconfirm that the regulations says what it says, and then appeals, and then finally the large companies will pay a large fine and then comply, followed then by the industry in large.
Delay, delay and then delay some more has been the response from the data collection industry for the past 10 years. Same for right to repair regulations and smartphones.
Maybe check out Brave Browser, LibreWolf or Vivaldi.
Do you have proof for this? I'd be curious. I also fail to see how is that related to the collecting data by default thing. Is that a leftist thing now?
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/first-steps-toward-lasti... https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozilla-racia...
Who even read these dumb company blogs before this?
Radical right: “Almost nothing great has ever been done in the world except by the genius and firmness of a single man combating the prejudices of the multitude.”
Far-right: “I know there are some who become sick when they see black uniforms… but those who come to fear us at any time must have a guilty conscience before the nation.”
Right: “This means that every Canadian will see their income taxes go down. This means more money to pay the bills, to save up for your kids' education or maybe even finally afford a family vacation.”
Centre: “There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other.”
Left: “To put it bluntly, no one should be faced with a choice that says, in effect, “your money or your life”. “
far left: “ The role of the police and the military is growing, and the links between these enforcers of ruling class power and far-right and fascist parties and movements, are becoming more visible.”
Radical left: “ They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.”
When i think of radical left, i think of the proletariat rising up and freeing itself from its chains.
The only radical left thing about mozilla is the iconography in its original logo.
Oppressing workers is fine, but it better be inclusive oppression.
> Maybe check out ... LibreWolf
GNU says hi.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954535
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40966312
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40952330
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40971247
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40965161
...and probably a few I missed.
Opera? Other recommendations?
For those that don't know, Elinks is a text only terminal browser.
Recommend Mull or something else sensible.
Edit: Whoopsy, oversaw your /jk
I'm sadly falling out of love with the web. So much fun and enjoyment have left the web in the past 20 years and I don't enjoy or to some extend even benefit from the modern hellscape of modern commercial web.
1. Links/Elinks for most stuff.
2. If that doesn't work, Trisquel Abrowser which is a privacy focused fork of Firefox.
3. If that doesn't work, Vivaldi browser in a sabdvox to get that Chromium conpatatibility.
Go to: chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml then enable about:config after that dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled can be set to false.
Fennec[2], the F-Droid build of Firefox, does have about:config enabled.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39816429
[2] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid
> This acquisition marks a significant step in addressing the urgent need for privacy-preserving advertising solutions. By combining Mozilla’s scale and trusted reputation with Anonym’s cutting-edge technology, we can enhance user privacy and advertising effectiveness, leveling the playing field for all stakeholders.
I can only interpret this as the urgent need is money, and wants to sell its "scale and trusted reputation". Mozilla has been down this road before. It was not good for them.
> Anonym was founded with two core beliefs: First, that people have a fundamental right to privacy in online interactions and second, that digital advertising is critical for the sustainability of free content, services and experiences. Mozilla and Anonym share the belief that advanced technologies can enable relevant and measurable advertising while still preserving user privacy.
This is some pretty weak wording for a press release. The economics of the situation are that advertising will always trump privacy. Researchers have successfully de-anonymized anonymised data sets, including medical records. Why would these data be any different?
> As we integrate Anonym into the Mozilla family, we are excited about the possibilities this partnership brings. While Anonym will continue to serve its customer base, together, we are poised to lead the industry toward a future where privacy and effective advertising go hand in hand, supporting a free and open internet.
Anonym’s customers are advertisers, right? The same people who for decades poured money into eroding that free and open internet that we had…
> About Anonym: Anonym was founded in 2022 by former Meta executives Brad Smallwood and Graham Mudd. The company was backed by Griffin Gaming Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Heracles Capital as well as a number of strategic individual investors.
Well, it seems Anonym, Smallwood and Mudd had a nice piece about them written in the Wall Street Journal [1]. From the second paragraph:
> Graham Mudd and Brad Smallwood each spent more than a decade building Meta’s advertising system, which allowed the company to offer granular data about how ad campaigns worked with individual users, often by tracking their web and mobile activity.
[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-anonym-raising-t...
Yes, this is Cliqz all over again and that scandal cost them most of their German userbase.
FTFY. Both browsers have been pretty bad for privacy for a long time and are more than happy to exfiltrate your data to the respective operators without your consent.
While Chrome adverts and fearmongering campaigns are now everywhere and people seem to be taking interest in Chrome, but Edge is probably the most common, as I see it literally everywhere(including public service office facilities).
The companies buying ads aren't keen on privacy, at least not if it comes at the cost of optimizing sales, so I don't see anyone but small "do good" niche companies would buy into what Anonym is selling. Alternatively Mozilla will make money and start relaxing privacy restriction in order to extract even greater profits. I don't see them stopping half-way. The Mozilla leadership has again and again shown that they do not understand their user base.
Firefox is a great browser, but so it all Chromium based browsers. Mozilla apparently never considered why someone might stick with or switch to Firefox, when Chrome, Edge, Safari and other browsers do the exact same thing, sometimes perhaps better. I really want to ask the Mozilla CTO and upper management what they think their product is, because I got a in increasing hunch that Firefox isn't the first thing that would come across their lips.
Personally, right now the only reason I'm not switching to something like Vivaldi is my desire to ensure that rendering engines beyond Blink is represented in statistics.
I mean, let's imagine this works as explained -whatever, let's imagine it does and with no downsides even-. Now as far as I can understand this aggregate information ends up producing something like "this particular ad placed here ends up producing this number of conversions". Is this really something an advertiser wants to know? Maybe to some extent, but to me it sounds a lot more like something an advertising platform would want to know. Which is why I'm not surprised by Meta's interest.
To me this feels like a good tool to avoid paying small websites at all for just having ads. Impressions would be finally and completely discarded as something payable. Now for the ads on your site to earn you something at all you need conversions that you can now reliably track. For a site owner to be paid, they'd need to increase the CTR; they can't just "provide ad space", they have to work to earn clicks.
So maybe -probably- I'm way off here. Maybe someone can correct me. But as I see this, this tool seems very specifically made for the big advertising platforms.
Safari seems to be the only decent, privacy-focused browser left on the market.
Until the Ladybird arrives.
Safari has Private Click Measurement: https://webkit.org/blog/11529/introducing-private-click-meas...
And AFAICT, Mozilla's implementation is technically superior?
Since this is days old news with lots of discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40952330 and more)
the more recent development is Firefox CTO posting thoughts: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_abo...
I can't wait for Ladybird to get good, in a decade realistically, swimming against a massive current of Google pushing its unstandardised nonsense on Chrome, and web developers jumping on the bandwagon, making web standards more and more complex by the day so no one ever is able to catch up.
You can add to the dead internet theory the fact that the Web is now maliciously impossible to recreate and access from scratch if you are unable to compete with the billions Google spend to maintain their hegemony. Heck, even Microsoft found it was more efficient to join Google rather than to try and direct what they laughably call "an open standard." There is more competition to build reusable space rockets than in web browsers.
A sad day, and sadder days await us. Shame of Mozilla, and on the CTO trying to sell this feature as a good thing.
I presume you refer to the fact that most income of Mozilla comes from Google paying a fee to have their search be the default. While that is worrysome, it's not control nor ownership. Let alone direct control. At most it gives Google leverage.
I don't see that happening in a decade. What makes you so optimistic?
Honestly I don't have much to add to the conversation. Mozilla made a bad move, Firefox's big thing was privacy and not being Chromium and it's lost the first thing.
1. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attr...
Because it's very confusing now.
Settings -> Advanced -> Allow Privacy-Preserving Measurement of Ad Effectiveness
More discussion among others: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40952330
Does this new "privacy preserving attribution" feature respect multi-account containers? Or is it somehow not considered necessary, because it's meant to be less invasive than the tracking cookies it's supposed to replace? Call me skeptical for now.
I'm a happy user of multi-account containers, which lets me separate my cookie identities in Firefox. Before, I had to use different browsers for work and private, and yes, it solves this problem, but the best part is that I don't have to worry about tracking cookies, because they aren't tied to my personal accounts: In my experience, I can to a great extent escape the echo chamber I'm in, and the ads I see in it, by just deleting the cookies of my sacrificial default container.
Other than that, considering the status quo – that the web is already an unfriendly GDPR nightmare, I'm positive to the initiative. And because of the power of the default, I can understand that the feature wouldn't likely take off if it was opt-in, so I won't criticize Mozilla for that move either.
Edit: Weird, some people seem to have received more options than me. For me there was just one option to accept (Zustimmen) and nothing else. Everything was in German but I read German anyway. I was on mobile though, perhaps this is why? I can't see it again because I already pressed it.
A practice (pay or accept cookies) which was actually ruled in breach with GDPR but many German sites seem to do this somehow.
I agree with the criticism on Firefox but this is very hypocritical. Heise used to be a good company. I even used to subscribe to C'T and iX.
Our Data Protection Agencies ruled it okay. There was a recent court case that called it into question again, so we’ll see how things develop.
FWIW, my normal blockers manage to block the heise.de pay-or-track banner, different from, e.g. golem.
No, this part is mandatory:
> Datenverarbeitungen von Werbeanbietern einschl. personalisierter Werbung mit Profilbildung [Zustimmung erforderlich für kostenfreie Nutzung]
! Jul 18, 2024 https://www.heise.de ||cmp.heise.de/index.html$subdocument
:)
The only way to get some collective action from 99.999% of web users, would be to get multiple high profile media personalities to endlessly, repeatedly tweet about it... along with a catchy jingle.
Users would still have no idea about anything privacy related, but maybe 10% would do as commanded by their idols.
- choices presented must have the same visual weight (e.g for buttons)
- there must be no default choice preselected (e.g for radio/toggles)
- the fallback when no choice is made (e.g a dismissal or a "failure to display" a.k.a bug or nag blocker) must be equivalent to deny all
Instead we get this mess because enforcement requires litigation from users and these companies make just enough to claim "oh we thought it was Ok plus we go through a off the shelf pluggable third party so not on us" plausible deniability.
from https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...
> If the data subject's consent is to be given following a request by electronic means, the request must be clear, concise and not unnecessarily disruptive to the use of the service for which it is provided.
> Consent should not be regarded as freely given if the data subject has no genuine or free choice or is unable to refuse or withdraw consent without detriment.
from https://www.edpb.europa.eu/sites/default/files/files/file1/e...:
> Example 6a: A website provider puts into place a script that will block content from being visible except for a request to accept cookies and the information about which cookies are being set and for what purposes data will be processed. There is no possibility to access the content without clicking on the “Accept cookies” button. Since the data subject is not presented with a genuine choice, its consent is not freely given.
> 41. This does not constitute valid consent, as the provision of the service relies on the data subject clicking the “Accept cookies” button. It is not presented with a genuine choice.
> The use of pre-ticked opt-in boxes is invalid under the GDPR. Silence or inactivity on the part of the data subject, as well as merely proceeding with a service cannot be regarded as an active indication of choice.
> In the digital context, many services need personal data to function, hence, data subjects receive multiple consent requests that need answers through clicks and swipes every day. This may result in a certain degree of click fatigue: when encountered too many times, the actual warning effect of consent mechanisms is diminishing.
> This results in a situation where consent questions are no longer read. This is a particular risk to data subjects, as, typically, consent is asked for actions that are in principle unlawful without their consent. The GDPR places upon controllers the obligation to develop ways to tackle this issue
- does reader view toggle works? if yes, consult, end here
- am I really looking for some information that might be there? if "no I just clicked a link from somewhere on the internet", then end here
- still here? Hey, what about looking at the DOM, if the information looked for is not a simple small segment of text, there are good chances a few CSS/HTML tweak will reveal this. Got it? end here, though you might consider to automate this process with Greasemonkey if this domain often fall in your research.
- no luck so far? It’s ok, you know Internet is vast, there are plenty of other page to visit. WTF are you doing here anyway, don’t you have a job, hobbies and people to cherish? And what about a small walk, you look like you need some fresh air, you know?
Most (all?) companies which developed a browser have lax policies on data privacy. At most those are inline with major directives like GDPR. However, it's not in their best interest to protect / not leverage user data. So the real discussion should've been about the set of features that would attract a sufficiently large user base who would pay ~10$ per month subscription in order to make the model sustainable on the long-term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary...
No idea how much the new CEO is being paid. Probably just as bad.
> likewise, agencies within the U.S. government variously fund Tor (the U.S. State Department, the National Science Foundation, and – through the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which itself partially funded Tor until October 2012 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_%28network%29?wprov=sfla1
When it comes to privacy apps, I’d place significantly more trust in something like that than literally anything closed source or unscrutinized to that degree.
I was merely implying that there's a major difference between the model behind TOR and that of Firefox.
And also similarities: if TOR is funded by entitities we don't trust and it turns out to work fine, then Firefox, being "funded" by Google should not have to be a severe problem either.
There is no negotiating with the advertising industry. No system will stop them from acting unethically to gain an edge.
--
My idea for such a system: random GUID added to each ad. Browser plugin collects GUIDs. Client protects itself with random GUIDs removed and new random GUIDs added. Client sends GUIDs to a Collector they choose. Collectors run client GUIDs against Advertisers lists (bloom filters). Advertisers pay Collectors, and Collectors give to orgs.
Edit: replace GUIDs with 6 random bytes, so the existence of an id is not proof of it's being viewed. it needs to be plausible that the client added an id randomly, and that's not the case with a GUID.
I can sympathise about general usability concerns but they don't really relate to the OP.
I personally run Ungoogled Chromium for anything that doesn't work in LibreWolf, which is fortunately not too much.