There's some good context in the Mozilla kb article on this feature: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attr...
1. It relies on an 'aggregation service', which you'd better hope is trustworthy because they seemingly get all info about what 'impressions' you had and what 'conversions' you caused.
2. This is the browser acting on behalf of advertisers. It's nice there's a way for people to help companies benchmark their ads, but this really shouldn't be something a user agent does without being explicitly told to.
As the number of aggregators increases this gets better - as long as you trust at least one aggregators involved then your individual data remains untrackable.
Also, in general if you think Mozilla is likely to _actively_ lie to you to steal your data and track you, you're probably using the wrong browser in the first place and the aggregation service makes little difference.
They deny any direct benefit for the user, and then go on to list some actual downsides (CPU, network, and battery cost & privacy loss) for the user running their software.
> Any benefit people derive from this feature is indirect. [By] Making advertising better
Mozilla never fails to surprise by the choice of their alliances.
> Our view is that the costs that people incur as a result of supporting attribution is small. [...] In comparison [...] The value that an advertiser gains from attribution is enormous.
What would we all do without Mozilla saving dystopian corporate propaganda from the dreadful death through user choice?
Citation needed.
True, they're not going anywhere on my systems since they get stopped at the gates; not one but many gates, defence in depth is the norm when dealing with vermin. We will fight them at the router, we will fight them in the name services, we will fight them at the firewall and in the applications. Wherever they come, we shall be. We will never surrender.
The ad industry can blame itself for this, they have shown themselves to be reliably unreliable and are no longer welcome.
Sure they are - just install ublock origin.
Even if you're OK with the snooping and the attention hijacking and the slow pageloads and the pictures of rotting teeth, plenty of malware has been delivered by inept ad networks. Frankly, I find it strange when someone doesn't block ads.
If it became ubiquitous, online advertising would respond with something more embedded in the content and harder to block out.
And less profitable, otherwise they would already be doing that now. In other words: a step in the right direction.
And look where it's gotten us.
Wrong.
Let's ignore for the moment that ad-funded websites are not free but only pretend to be free (the average user pays eventually, otherwise ads would not make sense for the advertiser), non-commercial websites have existed longer than ad-funded ones. If anything, making "free" profitable invites profiteers that produce mediocre content but know how to out-SEO genuine free websites.
> So much of the internet is paid for through ads.
And the best thing for the Internet is if that part came crashing down. But even for the ad-supported part of the web, almost all of the actual content is generated by unpaid users.
I'm also a ublock origin user. But it only works because most people in the world are not ublock origin users. I view no ads and am subsidized by the users who do.
Why do you think the advertising industry is pushing for this kind of crap? Because they ARE scared that the world is finally waking up to them and making their business effectively illegal.
Or TSA keys so they won't cut your locks when inspecting your luggage.