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Comment by drtgh | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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 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.

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.

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