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Firefox CTO Responds On Collecting User Advertisement Data
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this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2024
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Dear CTO,
What makes you think that advertisers would drop any existing privacy intrusion software just because you just gave them another, less useful data set on top of what they already collect? For them, more data means better targetting which in turn means more profit. Do you expect those people to suddenly stop profiling everyone and make less profit out of the goodness of their heart? Well, then you are probably heading for a big surprise.
This is the corporations-want-to-be-good falacy.
Yep. Common sense would tell one that this is a stupid idea from the word go, but sadly common sense is way less common than the name implies.
It could make it easier to get privacy preserving legislation through if there's a technical solution to the part they actually need.
I hate ads, and hate tracking, and do my best to prevent exposure to either. But internet ads need to know what sites are driving clicks to function. Unless you want to ban ads (which I'm all for, but isn't realistic), technology like this, then banning additional tracking is your best bet.
I believe in "privacy preserving legislation" when I actually see it work. Legislation is Theory-Space, and quite often has no connection to online reality, as the net is international, but laws are not.
I, too, would like to ban ads, but banning them by law will not work unless it is an international law without any holes. Sadly, forcing advertisers into a less invasive mode and make them just rely on the firefox-defined technology is just as illusionary.
But the bottom line is that tech like this, that gives them the minimum they need without extra, is a hard prerequisite to any such laws even being genuinely considered. It's easy to disable, and doesn't give any extra information on default use case users because of all the other tracking. Advanced users who block that can block this easily. There's no real downside.
There's no legitimately plausible path to just banning their data collection without allowing for attribution of transactions. It won't happen.
Banning them in the US or the EU would have a huge impact, because it would preclude businesses that operate in those countries legitimately from participating in the market for those countries. But it isn't something that's going to happen.
Legislation like that might happen in places like the EU, but in the US at least, unless lobbying rules are amended, consumers stand next to no chance against the commercial interests of advertisers.