…so that advertisers can get answers to important questions without harming privacy.
Here I fixed it for them:
…so that advertisers can get answers to important questions.
Hmm, I’m not particularly alarmed, and good Mozilla is talking about this openly and with a compromising mindset.
Ideologically I have nothing against adverts, some of my happiest childhood memories were talking about adverts with friends at school etc. But Internet advertising has become something altogether more sinister than just someone trying to sell you something. They have become a vehicle to track and trace users across the web, profiling them, predicting their behaviour and trying to control their purchasing choices.
So this hybrid approach which is essentially getting back to the idea of ads to sell you something as opposed to ads that track you and profile you is a welcome relief.
I will be curious to see how it is implemented in the end for Firefox and I can promise you , you are not going to see such discussions about Chrome, Edge for Safari or sure.
It happens every single time Mozilla does anything. People just are WAY too quick to jump the gun and react like it’s tHe EnD oF fIrEfOx.
Still better than the alternatives. It’s like because some dirt in your bath, you are jumping straight into mud.
IMHO, the better alternative is a fork of Firefox. Duckduckgo’s browser is a prime example.
I’m currently using FireDragon (Garuda’s fork of FF).
Anyone that works with the like of Meta/Facebook will not gain any favor from me.
But, I respect your opinion. Thanks for sharing.
Well stated, I love it.
Anyone that works with the like of Meta/Facebook will not gain any favor from me
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
Better to work with them for a standard that is actually better than what we currently have then to let them do whatever the hell they want as they want and let things get even worse.
I do see your point, but call me jaded if you like, but I have no confidence with anything about improving privacy when associated with Meta/Facebook.
Add the No-Script extension to your browser and look at how many sites employ facebook.com and facebook.net trackers. To me, their intentions are very clear, even though they try to hide it.
Two things stood out for me…
“Random noise must be added to the aggregate result to provide ɛ-differential privacy.”
This is something Apple’s used to some degree. Assuming it’s done well it’s pretty good at guarding privacy and takes considerable work to implement so that’s a big plus for Mozilla.
“To ensure events can be joined across browsers, devices, and even app and web, there must be some kind of match key.”
This gives websites the ability to tell Firefox to attach a private unique id to a known person so they can be tracked across all devices and because it’s embedded in the browser it’s the functional equivalent of a Mozilla super cookie but one Firefox may allow you to opt-in for turning off and i’m not sure if random noise will be applied prior to being sent to data being fed to FF servers.
Assuming this is done well, that it can be turned off and noise is added to tracking prior to upload to Mozilla, this could be ok-ish given Mozilla needs the non-Google revenue.
I heard somewhere that Facebook earns about $7/yr in ad revenue from each user and perplexingly doesn’t just allow you to pay $7/yr for no tracking. I’d consider a $40 “buy Firefox for life” option if I got a special code that set Firefox up similar to Librewolf (all Mozilla/Google chatter turned off) though i’d also want to see the security team returned to it’s original size.
There’s also the perspective of turnkey tyranny because while Mozilla won’t be able to tie personal identities to their “super cookie”, any state actor (or someone looking at hacked data dumps) could do it by getting that information from the companies that tagged that user using Mozilla’s service (assuming they can also access what Mozilla will have recorded).
I love the idea of poisoning the stream. I use a FF extension called user-agent that randomizes the data sent from my browser (OS type, browser type, etc) not just for every visit to a site, but for each and every request.
I have no love for any data collection these days. Those bastards can all burn in hell for all I care.
/rant
LOL, I thought you might get a kick out of that.
did you see my reply to TJ-Wolf?
SPAM lately?
What drives me crazy is this is 2022 and Firefox/Chrome will STILL tell websites how big your monitor resolution is, even the size of your window decoration despite that being literally useless for layout rendering which just needs viewport size.
This is level 1 pre-school stuff for reducing tracking metrics not to mention giving away things like what fonts are on your system and/or allowing that to be mined through css/js tests, ect ect.
In general it’s very hard for me to consider the efforts of these companies to be serious when the low hanging fruit is left right on the table for no reason or close to no reason.
Getting riled up here 
Oh, I have another extension for that…Canvas Blocker. Blocks finger-printing my browser.
I have so much fun with this stuff. “Stick it to man” !!!
LOL
The open-source community has completely spoiled me. I even frown on closed-source solutions at work now (within reason of course, not trying to lose my job).
Does the browser really tell the desktop resolution or just the browser window size? That’s why Tor always starts with a defined window size. If you don’t change the window size, then you are less likely to be tracked, because every Tor user have the same size.
If we are speaking about Firefox privacy and security addons, I want to mention a few too: uMatrix, uBlock Origin, JavaScript Restrictor, LocalCDN, ClearURLs, User-Agent Switcher and Manager, Don’t touch my tabs! (rel=noopener). You don’t need all of them, but if you want dig into, then have a look at these.
As a thought experiment, I asked myself, could I even make it one day, using Falkon, as my daily driver web browser? Nope.
If there are any even-more-Privacy-respecting Firefox forks that are very nicely packaged for Ubuntu 20.04 (will auto-update, with the rest of the updates, no PPA), then I’m interested in hearing about them. Snaps or Flatpaks with containment would be nice.
I agree that a very good Ad Blocker like uBlock Origin is a must, @astronautsupplier
PS: Would you believe there is a snap for NCSA Mosaic? Now there’s a blast from the past.