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.
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.
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:
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.