Thatâ™s⠀really cool. � Ꭰо уо𝗎 𝗍һі𝗇𝗄 уо𝗎’ӏӏ со𝗇𝗍і𝗇𝗎е ᖯ𝗋о𝗐ѕі𝗇𝗀 ӏі𝗄е 𝗍һа𝗍?
Thatâ™s⠀really cool. � Ꭰо уо𝗎 𝗍һі𝗇𝗄 уо𝗎’ӏӏ со𝗇𝗍і𝗇𝗎е ᖯ𝗋о𝗐ѕі𝗇𝗀 ӏі𝗄е 𝗍һа𝗍?
(Not an actual, like, punching him in the head beatdown.)
Look, let’s not be picky here
Their acquisition of Anonym was all about acquiring the feature this article is about, PPA. Anonym created PPA. In fact Anonym seems to have been created for the explicit purpose of creating this privacy-respecting system as an alternative to cross-site tracking cookies. I see no reason to doubt Mozilla’s intentions here.
Yeah - I’ve actually softened my own stance since I wrote that paragraph near the end, too, I just didn’t feel like editing a message that I claimed to have copy/pasted. While I still have no intention of enabling the feature in my install, that’s out of pure spite for anything that could conceivably help an advertiser somewhere, even if it isn’t at my expense. I do see value in the feature itself existing. While I think the industry is unlikely to abandon tracking cookies and swap to this system voluntarily, I could see certain governments eventually mandating such a change, if the feature proves robust enough.
I might even go as far as to agree that on-by-default is the better option for the feature’s chances of success - but for new installs. When new features are added to existing installs in updates, particularly if those features are in the “Privacy & Security” section of the settings page, it would probably be better practice to ask the user to pick an option on the first boot after updating.
Copy/pasting my comment from the earlier thread on this that got deleted for misinformation
After reading about the actual feature (more), this seems like an absolutely gigantic non-issue. Like most anti-Mozilla stories end up being.
The whole thing is an experimental feature intended to replace the current privacy nightmare that is cross-site tracking cookies. As-implemented it’s a way for advertisers to figure out things like “How many people who went to our site and purchased this product saw this ad we placed on another site?”, but done in such a way that neither the website with the ad, nor the website with the product, nor Mozilla itself knows what any one specific user was doing.
The only thing I looked for but could not find an answer on one way or the other is if Mozilla is making any sort of profit from this system. I would guess no but actually have no idea.
There are definitely things that can be said about this feature, like “Fuck ad companies, it should be off by default” (my personal take), or “It’s a pointless feature that’s doomed to failure because it’ll never provide ad companies with information as valuable as tracking cookies, so it’ll never succeed in its goal to replace tracking cookies” (also my take). But the feature itself has virtually no privacy consequences whatsoever for anybody.
I’m absolutely convinced there’s a coordinated anti-Firefox astroturfing campaign going on lately.
That feature (more) they’ve been getting all that negative press over for the past two days is an absolutely gigantic non-issue. Like most anti-Mozilla stories end up being.
The whole thing is an experimental feature intended to replace the current privacy nightmare that is cross-site tracking cookies. As-implemented it’s a way for advertisers to figure out things like “How many people who went to our site and purchased this product saw this ad we placed on another site?”, but done in such a way that neither the website with the ad, nor the website with the product, nor Mozilla itself knows what any one specific user was doing.
There are definitely things that can be said about this feature, like “Fuck ad companies, it should be off by default” (my personal take). But the feature itself has virtually no privacy consequences whatsoever for anybody, and Mozilla is at least trying to build a system that would legitimately improve the privacy situation on the internet created by companies like Google.
To anyone reading, don’t do this. The real toggle is here.
After reading about the actual feature (more), this seems like an absolutely gigantic non-issue. Like most anti-Mozilla stories end up being.
The whole thing is an experimental feature intended to replace the current privacy nightmare that is cross-site tracking cookies. As-implemented it’s a way for advertisers to figure out things like “How many people who went to our site and purchased this product saw this ad we placed on another site?”, but done in such a way that neither the website with the ad, nor the website with the product, nor Mozilla itself knows what any one specific user was doing.
The only thing I looked for but could not find an answer on one way or the other is if Mozilla is making any sort of profit from this system. I would guess no but actually have no idea.
There are definitely things that can be said about this feature, like “Fuck ad companies, it should be off by default” (my personal take), or “It’s a pointless feature that’s doomed to failure because it’ll never provide ad companies with information as valuable as tracking cookies, so it’ll never succeed in its goal to replace tracking cookies” (also my take). But the feature itself has virtually no privacy consequences whatsoever for anybody.
I’m absolutely convinced there’s a coordinated anti-Firefox astroturfing campaign going on lately.
Using uBlock Origin to get rid of the Youtube Shorts section of the sub feed was amazing for me. Are there other things you block too?
Which downloader do you use?
Oh hey, you managed to think up the one scenario that would make me abandon Firefox
Hi, this is Andy here, the Founder/CEO of Proton. As former scientists, we don’t do what we’re doing to make the most money (otherwise we wouldn’t have picked science as a profession). There’s no price which we would sell Proton to Google or Facebook. We also don’t need to because thanks to the strong support of the community, Proton has the resources to thrive and grow as an independent organization. Safeguarding this independence is how we ensure that over the long term, we can always put user interest above all else.
-Protonmail Founder, 2 years ago, for what it’s worth.
Was it even still around? I can think of a few times in the past few months where I’ve tried to find the cached link to a google result and failed. Most recently just two days ago, when a site I wanted to use was down for maintenance.
I saw the Youtube banner telling me it detected an ad blocker and wouldn’t let me watch a lot for about a week. Now it’s been over two months with nothing but smooth sailing on μBlock Origin. I’m even back to being able to block Shorts from appearing on my sub feed, where before it seemed like any YT-specific filters would let them detect the blocker.
μBlock Origin works for me still (Firefox), but I had to remove my custom filter to remove Shorts from the Subscription page - seems like they can detect it if I have any YT-specific rules.
I’ve got FreeTube set up as a backup in case μBlock does ever fail - but its lack of tabs really make me not want to use it as my primary access yet. I think they could benefit a lot from creating a browser-based UI, kind of like what Plex has.
Almost: x²/2 + C
That’s not even always the issue though - like recently Veritasium had an ancient video demonitized for mentioning that the subject of the video committed suicide, so now their most recent video is a censored re-upload of it. They include a new segment talking about the frustrating demonitization scheme Youtube has.
Whatever happened with that anyways? The last update I ever remember reading was Musk saying he’d show up at Zuckerberg’s front door “tomorrow” demanding to fight.
I mean, I can guess what ended up happening (or not happening) - but was that it? No show, no reason, no follow-up? Is he even keeping up the pretense of being serious anymore?
Or older versions of browsers, or browsers that don’t comply, or browsers compiled for literally any other country
In fact, uBlock Origin is one of the officially recommended extensions by Mozilla
uBO Lite was incorrectly flagged as violating policy by someone at Mozilla, but rather than appeal that decision in any capacity at all, the developer just removed the add-on entirely without responding to Mozilla. The original decision was almost certainly just an error.