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Mozilla Welcomes Anonym: Privacy Preserving Digital Advertising | The Mozilla Blog (blog.mozilla.org)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/firefox@fedia.io
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Mozilla has acquired Anonym, a trailblazer in privacy-preserving digital advertising. This strategic acquisition enables Mozilla to help raise the bar for the advertising industry by ensuring user privacy while delivering effective advertising solutions.

About Anonym: Anonym was founded in 2022 by former Meta executives Brad Smallwood and Graham Mudd. The company was backed by Griffin Gaming Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Heracles Capital as well as a number of strategic individual investors.

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[–] 17 points 2 years ago (15 children)

Wasn't Mozilla supposed to be looking for a new CEO? Maybe they should get that done before throwing away millions of dollars on acquisitions? Surely the rush to destroy everything by adopting slogans like "data is the fuel that drives performance advertising" can wait for a few more months?

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (13 children)
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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago* (11 children)

    As it says there, Laura Chambers was to take the job "for the remainder of this year" in a "transitional period" before a more permanent choice was made.

    But I suppose this removes any doubt we might've had about whether she is keen to continue Mitchell Baker's bright idea of turning Firefox into an ad platform. I had harboured some hope that opponents of that idea were the ones who forced the previous CEO out.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (10 children)

    But I suppose this removes any doubt we might've had about whether she was keen on continuing Mitchell Baker's bright idea of turning Firefox into an ad platform.

    Unless you insist that Mozilla shouldn't get funded (or mistakenly think it would not do severely worse if it had a lot less money), then you'd be proposing a pretty big bet to find a different funding source. Essentially, Mozilla is already funded by advertising - on Google, when you use it via Firefox's default search engine settings.

    As for potential alternative sources, donations wouldn't bring in near the same amount of money, and the subscription business is still nascent (but still proof that advertising isn't the only thing Mozilla is looking at), and not a guarantee that it would bring in sufficient revenue.

    And of course, there's the question of how to fund the rest of the web. That's currently advertising, and if that remains the primary funding source, it'd at least be nice if it could be done without extensive surveillance.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (9 children)

    How to free the rest of the web from advertising is not Mozilla's problem. They are not even asking the right questions.

    As for how they should deal with finances, in my opinion they should've taken some of the many hundreds millions of dollars they're paid annually in excess of what it costs to maintain a web browser, and used that money to build up an endowment that would suffice to keep them funded for eternity. Mozilla Corp is said to be organized as a for-profit corporation in order to give it freedom from the legal restrictions that govern how non-profits can spend their money, so I don't see why it wouldn't be allowed to do that.

    There are of course many other possible ideas. Trying to collect data about Firefox users in order to better target ads at them — while preserving everyone's privacy of course — is fairly close to the worst one I can think of. It thoroughly undermines their brand identity, and will only accelerate the loss of market share. Not being an ad company has until recently been the number one advantage they had over the competition, and they're slowly throwing it away piece by piece. Aside from the considerable technical challenges in actually doing privacy-preserving surveillance advertising, saying "we'll collect data about you for advertising purposes but never invade your privacy" is also practically impossible to convince people of. Nobody without an MBA is buying it, and I don't blame them.

    This direction will not be sustainable.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    How to free the rest of the web from advertising is not Mozilla's problem.

    It kinds is though, the reason it exists is to ensure the internet is a healthy global public resource.

    Some of the many hundreds millions of dollars they're paid annually in excess of what it costs to maintain a web browser

    AFAIK Mozilla nets about $500 million a year from Google being the default search engine, which is roughly the entire budget, and is lower than what Google and Apple spend to maintain their web browsers. So your numbers seem optimistic to me.

    Trying to collect data about Firefox users in order to better target ads at them

    I haven't seen that happening, or at least, not "collect" in the sense of "Mozilla has data about Firefox users in order to better target ads at them". Possibly that the user's own local device has that data.

    Again, Mozilla has always been an ad-funded operation. But also always without doing surveillance.

    (I do 100% agree that it is a risky business to be in and that I'd hate to see it cross the line, but I'm withholding judgment until I actually see that happening.)

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    I haven't seen that happening

    They've been talking about it for a while. They took one small step over that line into actually doing it last month.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    Ah right, we're talking different definitions of "Firefox users". I meant that they're not collecting data on specific users, i.e. there's nothing on Mozilla servers that says anything about me specifically. The post is talking about Firefox users as a collective, i.e. "this many Firefox users are searching for animals". Which is something it's done for ages, albeit not for what websites people are loading. (But it is known, for example, which menu items are most used.)

    I'll also note that that post is not about advertising but about what features to develop, but I'll grant that it's not a big leap to use it to serve more granular advertisements as well.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    If you don't think that's about advertising, then I guess they've managed to sneak "Firefox Suggest" in there without you noticing that its main purpose is to show you ads unless you take the time to find out how to opt out.

    "Firefox Suggest results may also include contextual suggestions from the Web and occasional sponsored suggestions from Mozilla's partners, which are also on by default."

    They extract sensitive data from the users, but simply promise not to keep it except in anonymized aggregate form. They talk about and acquire a venture that specializes in collecting such data for advertisers but promises to keep to it only in a super-secret encrypted computing enclave. It's the sort of thing Mitchell Baker often talked about wanting to do, in various interviews. They are aiming to turn Firefox into an ad platform.

    I imagine they'll probably fail and give up eventually, but who knows how much more damage will have been done by then.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    It's a bit of a stretch to turn "may also" into "main purpose is", but you're right - that shows that indeed it's not a big leap to use it for advertising.

    But no, as I understand it, this isn't extracting sensitive data from users and then only keeping it in anonymised aggregate form - the sensitive data is handled on your device and never reaches Mozilla, and the anonymised aggregate form (i.e. the high-level category derived from that data) is the only thing that's actually sent.

    And again, it's always been an ad platform, it's still the only proven way to fund development.

    I won't comment on this acquisition, cause I have no idea what this company does.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    They cannot aggregate or anonymise the data locally on your device, because that requires combining it with data from other devices. They can only water it down a little, just like google does with Floc or whatever they call it now.

    The difference between this and the minor act of selling out that is their main source of income is enormous and seems too obvious to need commenting on. The difference between this and something more comparable such as sponsored links in Pocket is indeed that they are starting to collect audience data to enable it. It's a small start, but it's a major departure from the already somewhat distasteful situation people were accustomed to.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    As I understand it, the way it works is that the aggregate categories are defined beforehand, e.g. "these sites are part of the "animals" category. So then if you visit any of those sites, your local install will match them against that list, and then share the aggregation outcome (i.e. "you visited an 'animals' site"), without having to share the specific site you viewed - which thus Mozilla can't even know.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Right, no doubt it's something like that. So in short it's sending information about your web browsing habits to Mozilla so that they can better inform their advertisers of who they'll be reaching with their sponsored url bar suggestions.

    Sometimes I forget that there are people who would have no problem with that. But after all, billions of people are happy to use Chrome.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago

    It's not clear to me if this is an acquisition of the venture capital subsidiary, but this part of Anonym's FAQ is disappointing:

    Privacy is an ambiguous term! Our primary focus is reducing or eliminating the need for advertisers and ad platforms to share personally identifiable information, attributes and behaviors about individuals with each other. It’s this kind of data sharing that often violates the expectations of users and creates legal and policy compliance issues.

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    • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Before I start reading, if this has anything to do with differential privacy, I'm going to be disappointed.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    What's wrong with differential privacy?

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