Privacy-Preserving Attribution: Testing for a New Era of Privacy in Digital Advertising

Companies get extra data through Firefox, which now acts on behalf of the ad corporations.

But advertisers have better options, both for reach, or for privacy. They can simply do A/B testing on their own, without involving a third party...

If you trust the advertiser, they can do it on their own. If you don't trust the advertiser, then the additional third party does nothing.

Genuine question, would you be willing to pay for all the content you consume using a "token" system where each page, video or other piece of media has a price to it, usually about a cent per article or 5c per video, is automatically debited from either an account loaded with real money or some sort of blockchain, at the discretion of the user? A token could be one cent.

There'd be an open API, and multiple brokers could handle that transaction for you, so there is no vendor lock-in. You could even be your own broker if you set up your own server that talks to the servers hosting any media you'd like to consume. It would get rid of online advertising, but you have to pay out of pocket for server costs and content creation costs.

It's just more communication about the same thing. Started out with just a mention in the release notes and a checkbox in the settings, which clearly wasn't enough (hence your calling it "silently"), then a more elaborate response on Reddit, and now this more detailed blog post outside of Reddit's walled garden. And I'm sure it's not the last we'll hear of it. (I'd be curious about the experiment's results too, for example.)

Advertisement is not free. It's a trick that looks free if you ignore the entire way it functions.

It doesn't take an expert understanding of economics to see that any belief that advertisement allows for a free Internet is smoke and mirrors. The money comes from somewhere, notably from you.

I think thats kind of obvious that the money has to be coming from somewhere. The ads are what funds large parts of the internet. Someone is paying for it, either the people buying stuff because of the ads or the businesses buying the ads.

Whichever way it is, maybe both, it has the side effect of distributing the cost of the Internet. The alternative without ads would be everyone paying for every little thing on the internet, does anyone think, that that scenario is realistic? That would also mean the cost is solely on the people and nothing coming from corporations.

Mozilla by itself doesn't have the influence to change it, but with Mozilla's help (i.e. this experiment), others do. Specifically, legislators can have more freedom to implement strict privacy-protecting measures if they have proof that an alternative is available that doesn't cost lots of voters their jobs.

But you can't provide that proof if you don't run the experiment.

Firefox already blocks all trackers by default. I think Mozilla is trying to be the good guy by providing a more private option that’s available to people that don’t use Firefox. It seems pretty naive, but I think their heart is in the right place.

At the end of the day, this is just another setting to toggle off on a fresh install for those of us against all tracking and advertising on the web.

Good comment. Thanks for sharing that insightful information.

What more do you think should be done to stop fingerprinting, and does that involve sacrificing usability?

(Also, "almost nothing" feels like a gross exaggeration? Just the Tor Uplift project brought in lots of measures, quite a few of which could even be enabled by default.)