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Firefox enables user tracking
(mstdn.social)
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this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2024
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Advertisers can already easily get this data without this setting, and any measures you take to block ads also by definition affect this setting.
Meanwhile, if this works and becomes widely available, regulators will be able to take measures against user surveillance without having to succumb to the ad industry's argument that they won't know whether their ads work.
And yes, this provides data to advertisers, but it's data about their ads, not about users.
Ah yes, the hypothetical second step, in which tracking is going to be outlawed (I'm not holding my breath), except, of course, for the third party services that do the aggregating, which will "sell" (literal quote) the aggregate data, so I guess these are by semantic sophistry not adtech companies but something else.
I'm so glad this genius "plan" can be used to justify Mozilla funneling data to adtech firms right now, because in some hypothetical future timeline this somehow can be construed with a bunch of hand-waving and misdirection to be in my interest.
How about instead we have a browser that only cares about the users, and not give a fuck about adtech? Its number one goal should be to treat adtech as hostile, and fight to ruin that whole industry.
You're saying you're literally quoting the ISRG as planning to sell the data? Because that goes directly against what I've read about this, which I believe says that they wouldn't even be able to because they can't see the data.
Ok, I misremembered it says "pay" for the aggregate results, not sell.
So it doesn't say ISRG is going sell data, but the "full solution" will have other operators that get payed, i.e. they're going to sell the aggregate data. Also, they envision multiple such operators, all of which it seems need to be "trusted".
https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experiment#end-user-benefit
Ah gotcha, thanks for bringing in the source - that does come down to the ISRG selling it. The thing I'd missed in your quote is that it's referring to aggregate data. So yeah, how that meshes with what I've read is that the ISRG won't be able to view user data, but indeed the ad performance data would be sold to advertisers.