Mozilla Welcomes Anonym: Privacy Preserving Digital Advertising | The Mozilla Blog
blog.mozilla.org
Mozilla has acquired Anonym, a trailblazer in privacy-preserving digital advertising. This strategic acquisition enables Mozilla to help raise the bar for
    • Piece_Maker@feddit.ukEnglish
      17·
      2 years ago

      Yeah pretty much. The privacy invasion of ad companies is terrible for sure, but the whole seeing ads all over the damn place in the first place is also annoying enough that even if they were somehow completely tracker-free I would still block them.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
      14·
      2 years ago

      Passwords?!

      Yeah, that and usernames are a big nope from me.

      I’m not opposed to the idea of privacy-oriented advertising, but it needs to be:

      • local only - no service, including Mozilla, can correlate me to ads being shown; advertisers and Mozilla can only know broad stats
      • opt-in - ideally it would replace ads on websites, not add ads, and ad-block should continue to be effective; I’m willing to disable ad-block if a site opts-in to privacy-friendly ads (my concern is tracking, I don’t mind them getting paid)
      • auditable - I should be able to see why certain ads are being shown, and verify that none of that metadata leaves my computer

      THEY USE GOOGLE ON YOUR DATA.

      Again, big nope from me. I hope Mozilla significantly changes how they operate and only uses their talent to build something actually privacy-focused. That’s a pretty big ask, so I’m not optimistic.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
          4·
          2 years ago

          They at least have good ad-block support, so I’ll continue using them as long as there’s nothing better. I’ve switched my mobile browser to Mull, and I’ll switch my desktop browser to Mullvad Browser if I need to (it’s not in my Linux distro’s repos, and I’m lazy).

    • RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works
      9·
      2 years ago

      For a company who has a whole schtick going where they read and critique other companies’ privacy policies, this is pretty ludicrous.

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
      4·
      2 years ago

      Is it done locally? On their servers? Who knows.

      You know it’s on their servers. 🙂 Otherwise they would be beating so much around the bush.

    • Thevenin@beehaw.org
      3·
      2 years ago

      That’s the only way to offer free services?! What about donation-based models? Maybe Mozilla could have set up something like what Brave has, except not based around a sketchy cryptocurrency.

      Please correct me if I’m mistaken, but I thought Brave only gave donatable tokens to users as a reward for watching ads… ads which Brave curated for the user based on their activity. It’s just targeted ad revenue with extra steps.

      At first blush, it seems to me that both Brave and Anonym want to be the middleman for targeted advertising. What am I missing?

  • TAG@lemmy.world
    33·
    2 years ago

    I am a little disgusted by this because now both major browser engines are being developed by an advertising company, creating more incentives for future web technologies that strengthen tracking and undermine ad blocking.

    From what I understand, this is an anonymized targeted ad company. In other words, ads are still targeted to the individual user, it is just harder for the advertiser to track (or profile) an individual user. Are there any companies still doing untargeted ads, ads where the advertiser might pick what site their ad goes on but cannot target a specific user demographic?

  • ssm@lemmy.sdf.org
    26·
    2 years ago

    Stolen from r*ddit, this is what the option looks like in the config (already in beta/dev channel)

    also stolen from r*ddit: “Anonym was founded in 2022 by former Meta executives Brad Smallwood and Graham Mudd.”

  • observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca
    23·
    2 years ago

    I wonder if the process is open source or we just take their word that it’s privacy preserving. Anyway, privacy is not the only problem with online advertising, so I’m not going to give up adblocking any time soon.

  • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.ml
    22·
    2 years ago

    Anonym was founded in 2022 by former Meta executives […]. The company was backed by [various venture capital corporations and multiple] strategic individual investors.

  • istanbullu@lemmy.ml
    22·
    2 years ago

    Advertising can’t be privacy preserving. What gives advertisement value is the fact that it’s targeted.

    • Cochise@lemmy.eco.br
      7·
      2 years ago

      Contextual ads can be privacy preserving. As in Netflix ads in a entertainment page. The problem is targeting the ad on people, and not on content.

  • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
    19·
    2 years ago

    Great

    I love how Mozilla seems to be trying so hard to kill itself. You don’t see Google marketing Chrome as the browser that serves you ads and sends back telemetry.

    • WagnasT@lemmy.world
      9·
      2 years ago

      i really wish i could donate to just firefox and not mozilla, I just want firefox to be better and not to spend money on all these weird things.

        • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
          4·
          2 years ago

          Yeah, no some guys blog stating his personal opinion is not evidence. We are just talking about things that are better than Firefox anyhow

          • ssm@lemmy.sdf.org
            2·
            2 years ago

            It would be more useful if you had something more substantiative than “it’s a blog so it’s wrong”. Is there actually something in the article you take issue with?

            • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
              2·
              2 years ago

              They blog doesn’t give much of a reason of why it isn’t private. It feels more like “I don’t use this so you shouldn’t” mentality

              • ssm@lemmy.sdf.org
                1·
                2 years ago

                How is Librewolf and Waterfox connecting to Amazon Cloudfront and a bunch of other domains on first boot and Waterfox having a sketchy privacy policy (article’s is out of date but the new one isn’t much better) a subjective opinion?

                • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
                  5·
                  2 years ago

                  For one, Librewolf clearly states what it does on startup. It has to update ublock origin and other threat lists. That is better than having out of date protections is it not? Just because it connects doesn’t mean it sends much data. Things need to be hosted somewhere.

                  For Waterfox the argument is less bad but Waterfox is about on par with a lot of other stuff. It isn’t going to be crazy good and it is no where near as good as Librewolf but it is better than Firefox and many others. I would rate it as half bad.

                  Librewolf is the arguably best privacy browser. You haven’t named anything better. It breaks sites occasionally but it does protect privacy and security and scores well on fingerprinting resistance.

    • thingsiplay@beehaw.orgBanned
      1·
      2 years ago

      The biggest problem with the alternative browsers I wanted to use is, that they are not managed by my distribution (repository).

      • ssm@lemmy.sdf.org
        1·
        2 years ago

        What distribution are you using? Every distro I’ve tried, even the more obscure ones (alpine, void, openbsd), package most of the webkit/webengine browsers.

        • thingsiplay@beehaw.orgBanned
          2·
          2 years ago

          EndevourOS, based on Archlinux. I was looking into forks of Firefox. For a webbrowser, it should be in the repository (not AUR) and it should be as quickly updated as Firefox itself. None of the forks I looked into match this criteria.

          • ssm@lemmy.sdf.org
            1·
            2 years ago

            Why use Arch (or something Arch based) then? I don’t like the AUR either (or systemd, or the bleeding edge (buggy) packages), which is why I like Void Linux.

            • thingsiplay@beehaw.orgBanned
              1·
              2 years ago

              I wouldn’t call Arch bleeding edge. There are 2 stages before packages get updated in the repository for everyone (maybe besides trusted projects? which get immadiate update). I wait since almost 3 weeks until they update RetroArch. :D But that’s just terminology and not really important.

              I personally want the newest stuff and being updated all the time. Systemd isn’t a problem for me, it’s fine to me. The packages from Arch repository aren’t buggy for me, so no complains there. You can always find reasons why to switch to another distribution, but that often is not the entire truth. There is often so much more to consider. My previous point is about the software I was looking into not packaged by the distribution of my choice. So many people say packages should come upstream, like in Flatpak and distributions should not package anymore. I hardly disagree here. But I digress… again…

              I’m not here to switch my distribution, but think about switching to another Firefox base. I think Firefox is a great browser and want to keep using it, but have a few disagreements with Mozilla lately. That’s why I was looking into an alternative fork. I will stay on EndeavourOS slash Archlinux… at the moment at least.

              Edit: Dang it, I did it again. Why do I need to write entire blog posts as a forum reply?