Most advertisers will not be satisfied with that. The real question is if regulators will be and therefore can use this as a reason to clamp down on advertisers. If so this might work, but I am skeptical. And either way it was wrong of Mozilla to sneak this in as opt-out.

I can see the economic argument, but I am not sure that I buy it. W3C could push this as a standard, but surely anything that is privacy preserving will by its very definition provide less data for advertisement targeting, no? With less data, the targeting is likely to be worse in terms of advertisement efficiency. Thus, the economic incentive even in an ideal situation as with a W3C standard will be pushing any advertiser to "betray" the system and fall back on the very arms race that Mozilla is arguing that they are trying to avoid, no?

At best, politicians could jump on the "solution", but then why are Mozilla not already lobbying in that case? Why is the first party they are reaching out to the wolf in this drama?

Regardless, Mozilla has lost me at this point as a user. This being opt-out is inexcusable and I will find ways to gravitate away from them as I should not need my poor package maintainers to be paranoid with their upstream code in the same way they have to be with Chrome in order to protect us from developer abuse like this. Will try Mull on mobile now, hopefully it is viable, and see how I solve the desktop situation when I can find the time.

It's not an attempt to try, it's reputation management. There is no 'anonymization' of data, because the advertising companies Mozilla is selling your data to now have almost 20 years of profiling that can effectively identify people through "anonymous" results. This has been known for years. Mozilla knows. They don't care.

An immovable wall is exactly what is needed to confront big corporations when they behave abusively (and intrusive profiling is an example of this). 'Pragmatism' here is just acquiescence in creeping surrender. Look what advertising has already done to the web and privacy.

Except being uncompromising is exactly how free software won. And compromising on EME DRM did not make websites using that DRM any less restricted to popular platforms. Compromise is not a winning move when what you are fighting against is fundamentally unacceptable.