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Comment by turblety | Hacker News Reader

Yup [1]. They've basically left their core mission and just sell out now.

1. https://noyb.eu/en/firefox-tracks-you-privacy-preserving-fea...

Things are more complex than that. Yes, they're engaged in creating an ads measurement technique that is actually very private (read the specs). No, they're not making money out of it. Yes, they've done a terrible job at explaining that to users.

Giving non-zero bits of information to advertisers is the opposite of private. They won’t stop using other methods of tracking, they’ll just use these bits as a part of your fingerprint.

AFAIK it gives advertisers aggregated data on the performance of the ads, such as "23% of the clicks on the ad end up buying the product". I would be enlightened to hear how this can be used as part of my fingerprint.

The absolute best case is that it doesn’t actually help advertisers track users, so it’s net-zero to users: advertisers will still track us through other means, but at least Firefox doesn’t help them do it. If any part of the process leaks non-zero bits of information, it’s actively detrimental to privacy; otherwise it’s just not helpful to anyone other than advertisers.

This also involves trust. The party doing aggregation has access to non-aggregated information and is able to sell it. As far as I understand, currently this party is ISRG, which has reasonably good reputation and probably won’t sell it. I don’t trust Mozilla to not silently add other aggregation providers though, as they did with this option itself. I’m also not sure that this data doesn’t pass through Mozilla servers, and I very much don’t trust Mozilla with it.

To summarize my thoughts,

1. There’s no evidence that “PPA” improves privacy in any way;

2. You have to trust centralized third parties doing the aggregation, and the full set of parties you need to trust is not completely clear;

3. The only party who obviously benefits from “PPA” is advertisers, which tracks with the fact that the protocol was designed with heavy involvement from Facebook: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KpdSKD8-Rn0bWPTu4UtK54ks...;

4. So it’s at best neutral for users and at worst is actively detrimental.

Except, there's the possibility that if this worked, companies wouldn't need to track users, and considering the hassle it is (at least in the EU), they will prefer using these non-invasive methods _instead_.

And this possibility seems to be why Mozilla engages in it. You might think it's not going to work, but from this to attributing malice to Mozilla's intention there's a long way.

> there's the possibility that if this worked, companies wouldn't need to track users

I don’t buy it. “PPA” don’t allow for targeted ads, so it does not functionally replace tracking. It’s an additional statistical tool made for advertisers and designed by advertisers.

> from this to attributing malice to Mozilla's intention there's a long way

Silently sending (non-aggregated, aggregation happens later) user data to third-party servers is enough to attribute malice.

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