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Comment by Hnrobert42 | Hacker News Reader

It seems like a lot of folks are pretty upset about this.

I go to great lengths to avoid advertising. I've even routed mail to my post office's general delivery rather than give away my address.

But I am also practical. The CEO makes a fair point that ads aren't going away. This wouldn't work as an opt-in.

The big miss here was messaging. The CEO has got to know most FF users use FF to for privacy. If they wanna make it an opt out, fine. But then people have to know there is something to out of. Then again, maybe this was in the release notes and on the blog.

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> Then again, maybe this was in the release notes and on the blog.

It belonged in the big tab they popped up when 128 was installed. If that's not for informing users about major new features they really should know about, what is it for?

It's weird, I never get that tab here on my FreeBSD install. Whatever triggers it doesn't happen for me.

Now, it's not even an officially supported platform for firefox so perhaps the maintainer did something that breaks it, and it's not super critical because I follow the news anyway. I'm glad it works in at all in the first place.

I'd much rather the ongoing game of cat and mouse than... this creation, honestly. It's entirely practical. I haven't seen significant advertising in forever. HN dogfood is the most of it

Basically, I don't buy the proposition that the surveillance will ever stop, so I won't disarm myself

> I'd much rather the ongoing game of cat and mouse than... this creation, honestly. It's entirely practical.

Also, I'm 100% sure that advertisers won't stop fingerprinting even when they have this, because it every little tidbit of info they can get will be worth it for them. It's not a gamechanger for either side. I won't let go of my adblocker and they won't let go of their sneaky invasive tactics.

It's the CTO not the CEO.

Yes it was in the release notes and the blog. But it should have been an opt-in, or a forced choice either way.

I agree. Thinking strategically, it is a win/win if advertisers can become convinced that this approach works well enough to rely on it. Inverting the responsibility for storing a users profile data - to the user agent - benefits the advertisers from a cost perspective and the users from a privacy one. “localfirst for your ads”

> I go to great lengths to avoid advertising.

It's a skill issue then, I do that too with resounding success, I haven't seen an ad in decades, either on pc or android. I don't use apps which have ads and only use browsers that support ublock origin on any platform.

> But I am also practical. The CEO makes a fair point that ads aren't going away.

So? I won't stop fighting. Especially since I seem to have won the moment ublock origin came out and that status is unchanged.

> This wouldn't work as an opt-in.

Yeah, because I hate that industry so much I'd rather not use a device than see an ad.

> But I am also practical. The CEO makes a fair point that ads aren't going away. This wouldn't work as an opt-in.

That's not practical, it's defeatist. Firefox has done absolutely nothing to make ads go away, that's all done by third-party extensions. They can at least try before claiming defeat.

> The big miss here was messaging.

No, that was a relatively minor blunder. The big miss is yet again ignoring preferences that they know a large part of their userbase has. Why do you think FF has been bleeding users? Because of shit like this that makes it into nothing more than worse Chrome.

> If they wanna make it an opt out, fine.

No, opt-outs for privacy violations are never "fine". Even an opt-in would still go agaisnt Firefox's mission since there is zero user benefit to this feature.

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