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15 pointssegasaturn9 comments

> Do what you do online. Firefox Browser isn’t watching.

How long can Mozilla make claims like this now that they've pivoted to being an ad-tech company and will not only be watching what people do online, but also recording that data in order to hand that information over to third parties who will then report that information to advertisers?

Tracking is enabled by default for everyone, but for now at least, you can disable this tracking in the settings. Firefox users will need to be sure to recheck that setting often to make sure updates don't revert their preferences.

Didn't know they pivoted to being an ad-tech company. Do you have a link to the announcement or something?

Sure, it came up here a few months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40703546

It's triggered a complaint for violating the GDPR https://noyb.eu/en/firefox-tracks-you-privacy-preserving-fea...

PPA is an experimental feature that's only enabled on a small number of websites, and only for sites that have signed up for it. I suspect that it won't go anywhere and will be removed since any site that wants to show ads is going to prefer the more traditional, intrusive forms of tracking.

e: source https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attr...

Considering Mozilla has already paid for their new ad company I'm guessing that even if PPA/IPA fails, Mozilla will just move to something else. They've made it clear that they are committed to generating profit by collecting people's browsing habits and putting that data into the hands of advertisers.

The smallness of the study makes it less private by its very nature.

> Having [PPA] on by default both demands stronger privacy protections... but it also enables those stronger protections, because there are more people participating. In effect, people are hiding in a larger crowd.[0]

There was also the fact that Mozilla later claimed no data was ever collected[1], which is a strange thing to say after claiming they were only collecting minimal data. Maybe everybody opted out?

[0] https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experime...

[1] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/09/27/002223/mozilla-hit-...

> Firefox users

Who? From HN threads it seems like the only people still using Firefox are doing so out of spite.

(I use Vivaldi btw)

I really wanted to like firefox for ios but it comes with a massive deficit: there’s no way to block those stupid popups nagging to share location or/and receive notifications. As soon as there’s an option to block them, I’ll switch.

PSA: Librewolf is a drop-in replacement for Firefox without the ad tracking.

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