https://www.spacebar.news/mozilla-firefox-privacy-preserving-attribution/
Firefox now collects data for advertisers. It's not actually scary, but there is a bigger problem.
I do know that Mozilla's Privacy Preserving Attribution is not something you should worry about
I believe Corbin is correct based on my own assessment of this feature however he isn’t providing any evidence either.
Adevrtisers arent going to give up their existing tracking methods unless the alternative is cheaper and more effective or driven by regulation.
With only 3% market share and little ability to sway regulators PPA could be the best solution in the world and still won’t see significant adoption.
So no you don’t need to be concerned about it… because it will be forgotten in a few years.
PPA is potentially something that other browsers could adopt if it works and advertisers are reasonably happy. Maybe it won't come to Chrome/Chromium, but I could definitely see Apple being interested and adding it to Safari.
Right, Apple doesn't have an ad-revenue & tracking empire to protect, and should Safari adopt PPA, the discussion changes. It would no longer be the API used merely by Firefox with its (estimated) 2.7% user base trying to gain any traction, it could be Chrome holding back the tech used by a cumulative (estimated) 20% of web users. That's a very different conversation.
Also, despite advertisers and big tech's best efforts, the chance remains that legislation is passed somewhere imposing stricter privacy protections on the web. Again, should that happen, PPA might be well positioned as an alternative to past methods of measuring ad effectiveness that advertisers wouldn't necessarily like... but any alternative that works could make them less resistant to such an important change.
All hypothetical, of course, but if you never consider future possibilities, what are you even aiming for?
I would never donate or pay you 5 bucks. Your articles adds nothing extra to my knowledge. Are more like opinions about stuff.
"A good compromise leaves everybody mad," as Calvin would say. So, what is Firefox (or Mozilla) supposed to do here? What are any web browsers supposed to do here?
The solution isn't simple
The advertising industry swallows up too much personal data so it can make valuable targeted advertisements. Websites, publishers, and independent creators now rely on the elevated income that comes from targeted advertising, and it's difficult to convince people to pay for content.
Um we must only look at the amount of profit made by these different parties to inform ourselves on where the problem might lie and therefore who might have to take a hit. The advertising industry makes humongous amounts of profit. They make that on the backs of users and comtent creators. You can easily see that by imagining the effects of removing either one of these from the equation. Removing advertising companies on the other hand does not have such effect. In fact prior to the Internet there was no third party advertising middle man between say newspapers and the actual advertisers paying for ads. If we abandon the nonsense notion that everyone gets paid what they deserve, then we can clearly point to redistribution needed from the advertising companies to the content creators and perhaps users. For the latter, either in the form of less data collection or direct payments for data. We probably wouldn't be in this position if we didn't live with an advertising industry oligopoly as some companies would have paid more to content creators and preserved privacy for users. However the free market doesn't tend to produce competitive equilibria in the long run. So it has to be distribution. Get these fuckers by their necks and shake 'em down for a big chunk of the profits they make and subsidize content and data privacy.
And you know how much it would cost any OECD government to publicly fund the development of a web browser? Yeah exactly. But our brains have been brainwashed to the point of not even imagining such solutions.
I agree that advertising companies take too much off the top and a lack of competition has probably made that worse. That's also an issue with a lot of publishers, many of them make buckets of money but still pay writers/editors/other staff poorly. That's just normal capitalism stuff that won't be fixed until there's a major global economic shift.
In fact prior to the Internet there was no third party advertising middle man between say newspapers and the actual advertisers paying for ads.
Right, because there were very few newspapers, and all of them were well-known enough that finding advertisers was not difficult. Independent creators and smaller publishers don't have the brand recognition or massive initial audience to make that happen. You can see this in action with a lot of YouTube channels; most of them only have access to YouTube's own ad system and offers for in-video ads from shady companies and mobile games (Better Help, Raid Shadow Legends, Opera, etc).
until there's a major global economic shift
Like when the Joker burnt a Trillion dollars?
Mozilla has a very good reputation of the privacy oriented company. I believe that they can make an advertisements with a human face. And it will be very cool, if Mozilla will be able to become independent from Google's donations.
Haven't finished reading the article because I need to go out, I plan to do so later, but is this... Is this actually a sane and nuanced take on the complex browser scene and its issues? Did not expect that in my tech media bingo today.
Not use 100% of my CPU at idle and become a zombie process when I kill it.
I think it might be a packaging problem but still I'm salty...