Mozilla tries ads in Firefox again, now powered by Pocket recommendations

Part of the market share loss is average users switching to Chrome - they can't do much about that, but the power users group is (or was) Mozilla's best asset, and yet they're pissing off that group with pretty much every release.

"now Firefox itself will offer new recommendations to sponsored sites based on your browsing history. It performs that assessment privately in the browser, Mozilla said." I don't believe this can ever be water-tight. Where do the ads get fetched from? Won't anyone who is able to snoop on that request (be it Mozilla, an ad network or (in case of an https failure) a third party) be able to deduce privacy-compromising information from the ad being requested itself?

Eg. If an advertisement is requested for a baby-crib (or a wider baby-category), you an as an advertiser deduce that the other end might (soon) be a parent.

The fact that Mozilla thinks it's able to preserve privacy by doing it in-house scares me. I don't want to trust any company with my browsing history or the processing thereof. If Mozilla decides it's in the ad business itself, I don't care how they initially try to preserve privacy by generating profiles in the browser itself. They will become an ad company with the same perverse incentives as Google and all the other advertising companies.

https://help.getpocket.com/article/1142-firefox-new-tab-reco...