<story><title>For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default</title><url>https://www.heise.de/en/news/For-advertising-Firefox-now-collects-user-data-by-default-9801345.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lopis</author><text>This &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; an attempt to try. You don&amp;#x27;t win my being an immovable wall going against the biggest corporations. If the W3C manages to create a system that satisfies advertisers while preserving our privacy, that&amp;#x27;s how you win. There isn&amp;#x27;t a future where advertising will just disappear. I&amp;#x27;m just being pragmatic here, as a user of ad blockers for 15 years.</text></item><item><author>rwmj</author><text>&amp;gt; leading to a perpetual arms race that we may not win&lt;p&gt;So we&amp;#x27;re not even going to try.</text></item><item><author>lopis</author><text>I think this line is very important:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 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.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s very likely that this arms race will lead to DRM in web publications and video feeds (which Google is already experimenting with).</text></item><item><author>eco</author><text>The CTO of Mozilla just posted on &amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;firefox about this:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;old.reddit.com&amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;firefox&amp;#x2F;comments&amp;#x2F;1e43w7v&amp;#x2F;a_word_about_private_attribution_in_firefox&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;old.reddit.com&amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;firefox&amp;#x2F;comments&amp;#x2F;1e43w7v&amp;#x2F;a_word_abo...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DoItToMe81</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not an attempt to try, it&amp;#x27;s reputation management. There is no &amp;#x27;anonymization&amp;#x27; of data, because the advertising companies Mozilla is selling your data to now have almost 20 years of profiling that can effectively identify people through &amp;quot;anonymous&amp;quot; results. This has been known for years. Mozilla knows. They don&amp;#x27;t care.</text></comment>
<story><title>For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default</title><url>https://www.heise.de/en/news/For-advertising-Firefox-now-collects-user-data-by-default-9801345.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lopis</author><text>This &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; an attempt to try. You don&amp;#x27;t win my being an immovable wall going against the biggest corporations. If the W3C manages to create a system that satisfies advertisers while preserving our privacy, that&amp;#x27;s how you win. There isn&amp;#x27;t a future where advertising will just disappear. I&amp;#x27;m just being pragmatic here, as a user of ad blockers for 15 years.</text></item><item><author>rwmj</author><text>&amp;gt; leading to a perpetual arms race that we may not win&lt;p&gt;So we&amp;#x27;re not even going to try.</text></item><item><author>lopis</author><text>I think this line is very important:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 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.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s very likely that this arms race will lead to DRM in web publications and video feeds (which Google is already experimenting with).</text></item><item><author>eco</author><text>The CTO of Mozilla just posted on &amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;firefox about this:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;old.reddit.com&amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;firefox&amp;#x2F;comments&amp;#x2F;1e43w7v&amp;#x2F;a_word_about_private_attribution_in_firefox&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;old.reddit.com&amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;firefox&amp;#x2F;comments&amp;#x2F;1e43w7v&amp;#x2F;a_word_abo...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ninjin</author><text>I can see the economic argument, but I am not sure that I buy it. W3C could push this as a standard, but surely &lt;i&gt;anything&lt;/i&gt; that is privacy preserving will by its very definition provide less data for advertisement targeting, no? With less data, the targeting is likely to be worse in terms of advertisement efficiency. Thus, the economic incentive even in an ideal situation as with a W3C standard will be pushing &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; advertiser to &amp;quot;betray&amp;quot; the system and fall back on the very arms race that Mozilla is arguing that they are trying to avoid, no?&lt;p&gt;At best, politicians could jump on the &amp;quot;solution&amp;quot;, 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?&lt;p&gt;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.</text></comment>