Firefox Testing New Privacy Feature, Working with Meta | Hacker News Reader

Firefox Testing New Privacy Feature, Working with Meta

maketecheasier.com

25 pointsfreediver16 comments

> Firefox needed something to put themselves back on the right side of public opinion. They appear to have found it. Initially, Mozilla released a prototype feature to Firefox 128 that was enabled by default. It was used to collect personal data for advertisers.

To read those sentences produce cognitive dissonance. Firefox users are absolutely against to the collection of personal data, especially if it's for advertisers.

A Trojan introduced in Firefox to track users' browsing behavior, history and so on, in order to provide this data to advertisers, which users are actively blocking through extensions. A disaster.

> A Trojan introduced in Firefox to track users' browsing behavior, history and so on, in order to provide this data to advertisers, which users are actively blocking through extensions. A disaster.

If I've understood this correctly it only provides data if you (1) see an ad, and (2) later visit the advertiser's site. If you have an ad blocker that stops #1 then there shouldn't be any data if you later happen to visit the advertiser's site.

Also, the only information given to the advertiser is that you saw their ad before you visited their site.

Mozilla are now capturing data on my behaviour without my consent (it's opt out), sending this data to a US based company (I'm in Europe) and that US based company is sending it to unknown advertisers and a universe of data brokers.

Setting aside that blockers are not 100%, why is my user-agent working for someone else?

Also setting aside that advertisers aren't the only ones doing tracking/data collection.

They're acting where the financial interests are, that's it

> it only provides data if

No. This is not a good rationalisation, and you should not normalise it by using it. You're participating in the erosion of your own rights. Why would you do this?

Mozilla continues to reach new depths of disappointment. If they wanted to put themselves back on the right side of public opinion, acquiring an advertising company and working with Meta on new ways of collecting data from users is the complete opposite on what they should be doing.

Mozilla draws a large amount of funding from Alphabet (Google), I suspect this influences their decisions as an organization to a greater extent than is publicly disclosed.

Firefox has completely lost their way. I used to think that Brave was the bullet that FF users dodged but it seems FF was perfectly capable of screwing things up on their own.

Privacy and Facebook are antonyms.

This is executive incompetence at Mozilla. I'm not even criticizing the technical merits of what they're trying to do but how tone deaf can you be to have anything to do with Meta at this point? I'd prefer a partnership with the CIA or Google. Don't ask a fish how to catch a fish.

> executive incompetence at Mozilla

That’s a very charitable view.

executive incompetence is our corporate policy™

Something like 80%+ of Mozilla’s revenue already comes from their partnership with Google. So I guess that just leaves the CIA…

Had the misfortune of opening TFA while not on my PiHole's network. The undertones of the article seem a little ironic given how utterly riddled with ads the site is.

Firefox version 130 should inject false data into advertiser endpoints. That would be a nice feature :D.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com