> Bigger story here
It's not a bigger story.
THE story - in fact, the REVELATION - here is that Mozilla thinks it's OK to cooperate with Facebook on PRIVACY work. You can't make this shit up. Not even on hard drugs.
It's not a bigger story.
THE story - in fact, the REVELATION - here is that Mozilla thinks it's OK to cooperate with Facebook on PRIVACY work. You can't make this shit up. Not even on hard drugs.
If Facebook doesn't use this method, the work towards private attribution that Mozilla is doing doesn't matter.
Furthermore, Mozilla is requesting feedback from everyone, not just Facebook, which helps keep Facebook (and Mozilla) honest in this process.
What alternative would you propose?
How about not working with the fox on the least invasive way to eat my fellow hens?
How about not figuring out how to support advertising needs? They can just stick to figuring out privacy.
> What alternative would you propose?
They could focus on user needs. Having an ad-blocker by default would be a good start. Figuring out how to remove advertisers and the incentive to advertise (and thus SEO spam etc.) from the internet is a goal I would support.
The only people who are excited to see Mozilla partner with Facebook are advertisers. I disagree that Mozilla needs Facebook's particular input on this, but ignoring that, even if we say that they do, I'm still somewhat at a loss why they would expect normal readers to be excited about seeing Facebook's name pop up in an article title or why they would think that's something worth bragging about.
It reads like an article written for advertisers, with some fluff (maybe the standard is good, but they're not really going into detail) that basically amounts to "also don't worry, this isn't that bad for you."
I mentioned this further up above, but regardless of whether you like targeted advertising or not, this article still doesn't really make the case why I as a user should be excited about the idea that attribution should work across devices. I don't understand how any of this is good for me as a user outside of the broad idea of "ads pay for things, so you should care if advertisers are happy."
If it works, the improvement for users is that it provides similar monetization for sites (which benefits users in the broad way you described) but without advertisers tracking individuals across sites.
Stop worrying about what companies want and focus on your users. Advertisers are not Firefox users. Firefox users want to block ads, not have sanctioned tracking.
That work already doesn't matter before it begins. There is no solution Facebook will support that actually preserves user privacy, because their core business model is based on broad surveillance.
Any resulting standard will be user hostile and/or useless to advertisers.
This makes the endeavor obviously a waste of resources on Mozilla's part (unless, of course, they plan on selling out their own users to advertisers, in which case it's a great first step).
Am glad Mozilla's true commercialization intentions are coming full circle. They recently introduced Firefox suggest[0]. Maybe they can finally retire the privacy-first corporate-goobly talk they have been parading for quite some time and join the adtech space as a fresh objectively neutral player.
[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2021/09/15/data-and-firefox-su...