Cross-posting my comment from the post you cross-posted (and possibly created your account just to post?)
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 that users with pre-existing installs should have been asked to have it turned on (for optics alone, apparently), or that its mission of replacing tracking cookies is unlikely to succeed. 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.
There certainly are many people who seem suspiciously eager to find fault with Firefox. But it’s not really a surprise when its authors do things like this. They chose not to make this feature opt-in because they know that nobody in their right mind would opt into it. There is no benefit to the user in it, only risk. Mozilla seems to be leaving us to go off and join the advertising industry instead. People feel betrayed, and it feeds the cynical nihilism that comes so easily to social media users under the conditions of late capitalism.
People feel betrayed because that’s the narrative they’re being fed - the number of times this same exact story has been posted in the past few days is staggering, as is the number of anti-Firefox stories that have been posted in general over the past few weeks/months. But almost every time one of these anti-Firefox stories comes out, just a small amount of digging shows it’s a whole lot of narrative or even outright misinformation piled on top of nothing at all.
The truth is Mozilla did nothing here that harms or has the potential to harm its users or their privacy, and in fact they’re actively trying to build a system that, if successful, would be a paradigm-shifting boost to online privacy. Mozilla is a legitimately good tech company that has made and continues to make the internet a better place, which makes the recent coordinated push to demonize them as an enshittified boogeyman all the more bizarre, especially considering who their competitors are.
They added a feature to track conversions among Firefox users for online advertisers. Selling it as a “paradigm-shifting boost to online privacy” while accusing others of pushing a misleading narrative is absurd.
The system is designed so that neither the advertisers, nor the websites with the ads, nor Mozilla can ever tell which specific users had their activity contribute to the data being reported.
The current paradigm is that the vast majority of internet users have their activity tracked across a vast majority of websites. It’s that dozens of large companies have access to information about which websites you’ve been to, when you visited them, and what you did there. That they can and do sell this information to other companies, who usually have as their primary goal using that data to somehow extract money from you to them. Users who block tracking like this are a tiny minority.
The new paradigm would be that the companies in question know none of that, and instead get told information like “approximately 7 out of 487 people who saw your advertisement on [x] went on to purchase your product on [y]”.
I would call that pretty paradigm-shifting. The only absurd thing here is that this is somehow being used, loudly and repeatedly, to make it seem like FIrefox is somehow worse for user privacy than its competition.
I would say it’s more of a desperate attempt to continue the current paradigm of online advertising which deems indispensable the kind of data about conversion rates to which the industry has become accustomed, despite the recognition that their current means of collecting it must come to an end.
But either way, it’s incompatible with the principles of free software. Users are not meant to put up with features that are there for the sole benefit of someone else; someone they might normally consider an adversary. The only incentive we’re given to participate in this scheme is one that resembles blackmail. Except it isn’t even advertisers saying “do this, or we’ll spy on you like usual” — it’s Mozilla saying “do this, and maybe we can persuade a few of them not to spy on you as much, and to give us a cut.”
They are selling behavioural data about their users to advertisers. People are not going to be happy with that no matter how they try to spin it.
Nothing here is incompatible with the principles of free software. The feature isn’t for the “sole benefit” of advertisers - it’s beneficial to users specifically because it attempts to shift the paradigm from one where they have essentially no privacy regarding their online activities whatsoever, to one where they give up literally nothing about their privacy.
And they are not selling data - I believe that to be a straight-up lie. I’ve searched extensively to find out if anything is being sold here. I have no doubt at all that if they were, the headlines would be about Mozilla selling user data, rather than about tracking users.
From their FAQ:
Wait, what? You think they’re not planning on getting paid for providing this data to advertisers?
P.S. It looks like Mozilla’s Data Privacy FAQ is going to need updating. It doesn’t even mention this stuff. As the noyb complaint points out:
- The Respondent does not provide any information at all in its privacy policy with regard to “PPA”. Neither in the general privacy policy (enclosure 9) nor in the privacy information for Firefox (enclosure 10) is any relevant information apparent.
- The last update of the Firefox privacy policy took place on May 13, 2024.
They chose not to make this feature opt-in because they know that nobody in their right mind would opt into it
Nobody would opt into it because like your OP said, there’s an astroturfing campaign to make sure that people completely misunderstand what the feature is and what it does.
When everyone around you lies to you and tells you that seatbelts are “unsafe” and then the Feds come in and say “no they’re not”, you’re still gonna believe everyone around you even if they’re patently false. Hence forcing it so people see there isn’t a problem.
But what is their incentive to make this feature to begin with? Who is it really for?
Edit: this is more of rhetorical question I guess. To rephrase it a bit to get closer to my point: who is the browser designed for? For the person using the browser? For the website owner? For advertisers?
While I’m not hating on Mozilla it still warrant a discussion.
I look at it as a pragmatic attempt to work within the system we have to shift the internet away from its current nightmare dystopia of user tracking and information selling, and toward a system where all parties can be reasonably happy, with companies being able to receive aggregate anonymous data that helps them operate efficiently, without compromising even a tiny bit on user privacy.
But why appease advertisers, I don’t see the point? The current ad business only exists because it’s been possible to track people. It does not mean it’s impossible to do advertising without it. It’s not like it’s a right for advertisers to know in detail how their ads are performing.
Why wouldn’t Mozilla just disable all tracking? Why do they see any need to give anything back when minimizing another form of tracking?
You can be the enemy of the advertisers and they will do everything in their power to destroy you. Or you can not entirely piss them off and actually continue to exist and try to do as much good as you can.
By default they do block quite a bit. The “Standard” tracking protection option in their Settings page says it blocks Social media trackers, Cross-site cookies in all windows, tracking content in private windows, cryptominers, and fingerprinters. They have a strict option with a disclaimer that it may break some sites or content that does a bit more.
So they’re already blocking as much as they reasonably can without affecting legitimate functionality, and they have an option to block even more.
As for “Why offer them anything?”, my guess is pragmatism. They’re a lot more likely to succeed if they propose a system where the users give up nothing but companies can thrive anyways, vs. a system where the users give up nothing and the companies in charge of everything just burn to the ground and die.
I notably don’t have a strong opinion on whether or not I think they’ll succeed with this feature. I think their intentions are pure, though, and that it legitimately offers no privacy risk to users at all. I think the best chance it has is something like government mandates. Maybe there’s also a future where they somehow get Google on board for PR reasons or something. I wish them the best of luck.
The reality is that people want stats on their advertising and that’s fair, as much as we (rightfully) hate ads. Completely and truly anonymizing the data seems like an acceptable compromise in this world. Mozilla is one of the few entities left that hasn’t absolutely folded to capitalism, and I’ll take what I can get.
Won’t they just use both this new feature and the classic way of tracking you, now having more data than before.
I think this might be anonymized enough where they can’t do the same old fingerprinting. But idk the full details. For anything else in terms of tracking, that’s where I recommend finding other tools and adding layers to anonymize and block further.
API “Privacy Preserving Attribution”
It turns out that’s where all the Mozilla developers are spending their energy, not on improving the browser
I’d argue that’s improving internet. They’re about the only ones trying to come up with an actual solution.
There’s plenty, PLENTY of other examples to criticize Mozilla on not focusing on Firefox. This isn’t one.
Okay, they improved it that way.
I dunno, Mozilla developers have had 10 releases in the past 4 months alone, with many bug fixes in every release, and 3 of those releases being minor versions each containing multiple new features. I certainly consider bug fixes and new features to be improvements happening to the browser.
