Unnecessary journalist fluff around the source material from Mozilla.
this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2024
440 points (98.7% liked)
Privacy
31951 readers
626 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
which they didnt even link to by the way, not that I saw anyway
Thanks for this.
When Google said they were stopping 3rd party cookies, I thought it was just a simple security setting. The new system, Protected Audience, seems like 3rd party cookies without the whack-a-mole approach of listing every cookie advertisers can take, especially since there is nothing stopping data collectors from extracting data from it, like what Mozilla said in the article.
Hopefully there are fake data dumpers or cleaners for Protected Audience which would reduce the effectiveness of this system but looking how the Chrome team treats browser extensions, I doubt it.
How is Mozilla literally not controlled opposition? Their main source of income used to be Google.
How are they not just a antitrust prop so Google doesn't get split up by the EU.
Are you familiar with the phrase "the perfect is the enemy of the good"?
The echo chamber is strong. I am a big popularizer of that phrase for at least 2 years now. Agreed. Still the questions had to be asked to keep the concern alive.
Does such an angle exist from the google perspective? Probably.
Is it 'just' this and nothing else, I'd argue no.
Matters tend to be more complex than simple black and white statements.
I for one think Mozilla is one of the most visible actors with regards to privacy promoting thought and FOSS, with widespread 'mainstream' reach. If it wasn't for Firefox I'd have to use chromium for instance, and that would make the world a sadder day.
I do agree that funding from google is an obvious conflict of interest and probably influences policy in a way not a 100% aligned with humanitarian goals. This is definitely less than ideal and I think everybody involved on this side of the fence would like to see that change. Maybe you could help them with that?
If Mozilla is just a convenient prop for Google, then you and I are are just convenient sources of data to be fed into the machine for Google.
My sibling in Christ you commented this on a post about Mozilla going against what Google said. If Mozilla was a puppet this article would not have been written.
Controlled opposition can criticize so long as it's ineffective
I seem to recall Mozilla's opposition to FLoC being fairly influential
Mozilla has signed a contract with the devil, this is their problem. Although Mozilla is very privacy focused, its movement is limited to what Google allows. It is always a problem when a company depends on external investors, since they have a say in the decisions it may have. They may object to accepting FloC or other Google mechanisms, because Google does not require them to do so, because it already has its googleanalytics and googletagmanager built into Mozilla with which they obtain their data. I only hope that Mozilla manages to free itself from this contract this year, as it has announced, because only then will it have a free hand to be truly private.
It's only a problem in browsers which log the user activity, also if the user use Google for searches.
Partially yes, the other concern would be who does the DNS lookups? In my opinion there should be no DNS monopoly so there is no single point of failure if captured.
The entire concept of DNS is predicated on decentralization too.
There are dozends of DNS providers, there isn't a monopoly. Eg I mostly use Quad9, because is one of the fastes and reliables, apart nothing to do with Google.
Sounds basically like qanon for the Left but sure yeah totally
Google is an advertising company. Their goal is to maximize profit from advertising. Avoiding government regulation is part of that goal. By imposing "good enough" self-regulation they hope keep governments from stepping in. Their solution is definitely better than the currently dying 3rd party cookie free-for-all.
Mozilla is right to question whether "targeted" ads are a good idea at all. I personally find it easier to ignore non-targeted ads, myself. But, if Mozilla decides not to cooperate & holds out for the Platonic ideal tech, they may cause ad dependent web sites to block Firefox completely. That would not be good for any of us.
The time is nigh that I'll get to see a relevant ad. Finally a system complicated enough to able to store that I'm into pc games.
Maybe just get rid of cookies instead. Can't one disable them?
Cant really log in on any website anymore without cookies.
You can make logging into websites a one-click process with a KeepassXC and then clear all cookies when the browser closes.
LibreWolf does that automatically. I highly recommend it.
Ah... I think I will ban cache for sites in my black list like Medium.
Reading Medium article with Scribe and Libredirect https://libredirect.github.io/ works very well for me.
Tracking technology has been relying on so many other, hard to evade techniques for years.
Questionable ethics corporation #1 stands against questionable ethics mega corporation #1.
Do not know why you are being down voted, you are correct.
I am thankful Mozilla exists because it provides some choice but if you have to changed the user.js --a non-trivial action for regular end users-- or use a fork like Librewolf, or Mullad Browser or even Tor to maximise Privacy that should mostly come available as an easy opt-in setting out of the box, it educates me that Mozilla is not the angel fanboys would like it to be.
Also, their telemetry collection is not trivial either, even more so in their Nightly builds, which in fairness is sort of expected. Also, do not forget that FF has pushed XPIs to end users without their consent in the past.
Well, it might be the fanboyism hitting hard. I also like the fact that Mozilla / Firefox exists but it isn't the silver bullet everyone paints.
People speak very good thing about Firefox but they like to hide and avoid the shady stuff. Firefox is better than most, no double there, but at the same time they do have some shady finances and they also do stuff like adding unique IDs to each installation. I just see someone commenting "oh but download from the FTP and you won't be tracked"... seriously? Isn't adding an ID to the thing available on the installer that 95% people are going to use without opt-out or any warning crossing a line? There's no justification for this.
Firefox does is a LOT of calling home. Just fire Wireshark alongside it and see how much calling home and even calling 3rd parties it does. From basic ocsp requests to calling Firefox servers and a 3rd party company that does analytics they do it all, even after disabling most stuff in Settings doesn't fix it.
I know other browsers do it as well, except for Ungoogled or LibreWolf and because of that I’m sticking with them. I would like to avoid programs that need no snitch whenever I open them.
Bingo