this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2024
118 points (81.7% liked)
Technology
58287 readers
7502 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Copy/pasting my comment from the earlier thread on this that got deleted for misinformation
After reading about the actual feature (more), this seems like an absolutely gigantic non-issue. Like most anti-Mozilla stories end up being.
The whole thing is an experimental feature intended to replace the current privacy nightmare that is cross-site tracking cookies. As-implemented it's a way for advertisers to figure out things like "How many people who went to our site and purchased this product saw this ad we placed on another site?", but done in such a way that neither the website with the ad, nor the website with the product, nor Mozilla itself knows what any one specific user was doing.
The only thing I looked for but could not find an answer on one way or the other is if Mozilla is making any sort of profit from this system. I would guess no but actually have no idea.
There are definitely things that can be said about this feature, like "Fuck ad companies, it should be off by default" (my personal take), or "It's a pointless feature that's doomed to failure because it'll never provide ad companies with information as valuable as tracking cookies, so it'll never succeed in its goal to replace tracking cookies" (also my take). But the feature itself has virtually no privacy consequences whatsoever for anybody.
I'm absolutely convinced there's a coordinated anti-Firefox astroturfing campaign going on lately.
I genuinely cannot understand why people hate mozilla so much, it boggles the mind.
I love Firefox, I’ve even spent money to support it in the past. The Mozilla organization seems at best incompetent and at worst willfully corrupt. There’s no love lost here.
Mozilla is corrupt? How so?
When your mission is to create a safe and private web and you squandered your organization’s money to give huge payouts to your executives for not achieving their stated goals, that’s a form of corruption. Their relationship with Google was always viewed with skeptic eyes too. There are more. Nothing people can prove, but looks suspicious. Like I said, at best incompetence.