Gregory's ServerUnpopular opinion: The alarm over #PPA in #Firefox is overblown and if they had added it without putting the setting prominently in the Settings view but tucked it away in the about:config, I doubt anyone would be talking about it. The concerns about opt-in vs opt-out and communication are legitimate, IMO. PPA is arguably a potential privacy improvement for the industry. After reading more about how it works, I'm not mad about it. I just wish it had been communicated better.
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@schizanon If I were a Google Chrome user, I might have had an opinion? We all hold Mozilla to a higher standard than Google on privacy and open source. That doesn't mean users shouldn't have a voice.   @vwbusguy I mean, I agree, that PPA is a good standard for the industry, but I don't think browsers should be build for the industry, but rather its users. But I guess as so often, if you are a company, and you have to keep the lights on, non-paying users aren't very helpful and so you cater to the people, that fund you .-. @sheogorath Arguably, it's both. This is a way to influence the adtech industry to show them that they don't need to be so off the walls evil all the time to measure clicks and the ad industry being less evil is good for users. Yes, it's idealistic, but it's also a w3c draft standard that was developed in the open. @vwbusguy One of main problems with the Standard for me is how much its based on trust. Which for Mozilla itself, we might still argue, is fine, but at least according to their explainer, the goal is to bring more organisations into the game: > A full solution will require that advertisers — or their delegated measurement provider — receive reports from browsers, select a service, submit a batch of reports, and pay for the aggregation results, choosing from a list of approved operators. In some ways, #Firefox deserves credit for at least making the setting visible in the main settings. There are plenty of examples of other browsers burying far more nefarious things. That said, it's a hard thing to reel back in now. The bigger story here is yet another prominent #opensource tech company fumbled communications about a change that users cared about more than the company expected. Let this be a lesson about the value of investing in #community facing people to drive decisions. Privacy trumps ads. Every single day. Mozilla fucked up. It was their wrong priorities, not their communication. In fact, the explanation made it worse (testing for Meta, wtf). If the execs don't get it, Firefox has no future. People that care about that stuff are the ones that install Firefox. Other people just use whatever is installed on their system. @nxadm But PPA is fundamentally about privacy. Having the adtech companies only get impression and click metrics without identifying users, behavior, tracking, etc is absolutely a better privacy situation than the current status quo. I don't want them getting impressions. I don't want a 3rd party anonimizing stuff . That's privacy. @nxadm It's not 3rd party anonomizing. It's literally just a counter delivered to them by an aggregator run by Mozilla and ISRG on pages that were specifically requested. That's way better than anonomizers that haven't always been so anonymous. This is an alternative to anonomizers (or worse) that are commonly used now. I get that. I don't want to give advertisers anything. I want them to disappear. They almost destroyed the web. We know Chrome is working on that direction. I don't want to see Firefox go on that road, but "a little less badly". @nxadm Sure - I just don't think *this* is the slippery slope. This was done in the open, is a w3c draft thing, is incrementally in the right direction. That said, it definitely could have been communicated better. Mozilla desperately needs better community engagement.  |
@vwbusguy did you feel the same way when Google did the same in Chrome last year?