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Comment by cpeterso | Hacker News Reader

> We have to face it, the internet wouldn't thrive without ad-tech. Not many people are willing or able to pay for content. The digital ad industry is important and is here to stay.

How are ads in the browser relevant to websites that depend on ads for their revenue?

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It's not hard to imagine how this concept could expand to the web at large. Rather than deciding what ad to display by consulting a user profile built on cross-site history tracking, a site could simply ask the browser for advice on what to show, without the site having to learn anything in particular about the user.

Good for the site because they get better advice; good for the user because they get more privacy and control.

(I've nothing to do with the team behind this at Mozilla, and have no idea what their roadmap actually is. But it's pretty clear that this is just a first step in a broader version of re-inventing advertising on the web, not a stand-alone attempt to generate a bit more revenue).

Back in 2013, Mozilla Labs had been experimenting with a similar idea, a feature called "User Personalization" (UP). It was an API that get web content access to (user-controlled) user interest keywords, but AFAIK nothing came of the project.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2013/07/25/up-with-people/

EDIT: Looks like the "Firefox Interest Dashboard" add-on is a more recent exploration of this idea, letting you explore the categorization of your own local browsing history:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-inter...

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