It has come to my attention that many of the people complaining about #Firefox's #PPA experiment don't actually understand what PPA is, what it does, and what Firefox is trying to accomplish with it, so an explainer 🧵 is in order.
Targeted advertising sucks. It is invasive and privacy-violating, it enables populations to be manipulated by bad actors in democracy-endangering ways, and it doesn't actually sell products.
Nevertheless, commercial advertisers are addicted to the data they get from targeted advertising. They aren't going to stop using it until someone convinces them there's something else that will work better.
"Contextual advertising works better."
Yes, it does!
But, again, advertisers are addicted to the data, and contextual advertising provides much less data, so they don't trust it.
What PPA says is, "Suppose we give you anonymized, aggregated data about which of your ads on which sites resulted in sales or other significant commitments from users?"
The data that the browser collects under PPA are sent to a third-party (in Firefox's case, the third party is the same organization that runs Let's Encrypt; does anybody think they're not trustworthy?) and aggregated and anonymized there. Noise is introduced into the data to prevent de-anonymization.
This allows advertisers to "target" which sites they put their ads on. It doesn't allow them to target individuals.
In Days Of Yore, advertisers would do things like ask people to bring newspapers ads into the store or mention a certain phrase to get deals. These were for collecting conversion statistics on paper ads. Ditto for coupons.
PPA is a way to do this online.
Is there a potential for abuse? Sure, which is why the data need to be aggregated and anonymized by a trusted third party. If at some point they discover they're doing insufficient aggregation or anonymization, then they can fix that all in one place.
And if the work they're doing is transparent, as compared to the entirely opaque adtech industry, the entire internet can weigh in on any bugs in their algorithms.
Is this a utopia? No.
Would it be better than what we have now? Indisputably.
Is there a clear path right now to anything better? Not that I can see.
We can keep fighting for something better while still accepting this as an improvement over what we have now.
No, and that's why I don't use Chrome. But at least they said they'd do this.
Mozilla in turn said "hey here's this neat feature. Don't worry, it's optional!" And then they silently activated it for everyone with an update.
Mozilla said, "hey, in the chance you see an advert on the Internet, this will anonymise the data sent to the ad publishers for you automatically" and you said, "how dare you"!
Red herring, and you're missing the point, and this is getting frustrating. If you ignore the argument below again, I will stop responding to you.
From the Mozilla's website (so you don't say I'm ill-informed):
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution?as=u&utm_source=inproduct
Zoom in:
Zoom in:
Zoom in:
This is after an update, and it's opt-out, that is, enabled by default. And not a single notification about it. If I don't check my settings, or read about it, I would have never found out about this.
WHY IS MY BROWSER SUBMITTING ANYTHING WITHOUT ASKING ME FIRST?!
Plus it's described as an experiment. And I've already told Mozilla to NEVER include me in any of its "experiments," after the whole Mr. Robot fiasco. If this is labeled as an experiment, why is Mozilla not respecting my decision?
That's the issue I have with it. It doesn't matter what it is. It doesn't matter if it's "for my own good." I am supposed to be in control of my browser. I decide when my browser sends anything to the Internet about me, even if it's anonymized.
I would expect this from Chrome, and that's why I don't use it; not Firefox.
Your browser already submits information about you by virtue of existing.
What this does is put the mechanisms to ring fence that in place. The same way that the Enhanced Tracking Protection does.
Kinda like how even if you've had an STI test recently, you should still use a condom when sleeping with strangers.
Regarding the opt-in versus opt-out stuff. That's a dead fish. People go with what the default is. By default ETP is on. By default, autoplay is off. By default, HTTPS only mode is always on.
These are all things that happened without my explicit consent and they've all made the Internet a better place for normal people, not like me and you, but normal people who rely on the best defaults possible.
I already addressed this, for I wrote: "I decide when my browser sends anything to the Internet about me." If I visit a webpage, I know the browser is sending a request. What I wasn't expecting was the actual browser collecting data on its own and sending it to some third-party.
Not the point and we've already gone through this.
None of that is sending data about my browsing habits to some third-party. Maybe HTTPS, but even you can tell you're using HTTPS because of an icon next to the URL in the address bar. Where is my "icon" for the ad-anonymization thingie? That's my point.
You're ignoring the fact that fingerprinting exists and I don't get why.
Not the point. Goodbye.
It very much is the point. Whether we like it or not, fingerprinting is one of the dark practices that measures like this are designed to prevent. Where advertising publishers, take information that should be innocuous and use that to identify you, across a myriad of sites, thus identifying your browsing habits and what is trending and most importantly what you're spending on. To say that's not the point is ridiculous, because that's the very point. That's why Firefox has to bring in cookie isolation, without your explicit consent BTW, along with ETP and a bunch of the other things I mentioned above. And what did the advertising industry and the likes of Meta do? Find new ways to track you and identify you. Luckily, while Firefox was playing whack-a-mole, a proposal was put forward to the W3C. It says, hey if web publishers of the advertising kind can receive some specified data, can you be happy with that? After a lot of negotiation, they settled on a compromise and agreed to shun all that didn't agree, on the advertising side. There was just one last step, the proof-of-concept! Mozilla said, we're independent, we care about our users and we have enough users to provide a decent sample, let's lead the charge on this and improve the Internet, but they should've hinged the progress of the entire world wide web on your consent, when you're not even willing to understand what the question is.
Oh well, have a good day.
Not the point. This is a completely different argument.
Let's make it simpler for you:
What do you think of Mozilla activating a feature that phones home without telling you first?
^ Answer that question, and that question only.
Any "but... but..." is not the point, which is what you've been doing so far.
It's not about doing the right thing or not. I completely understand that. It's about consent.
Consent.
Consent.
If they don't ask for consent now, they won't ask for consent later for something you, yes, you won't like.
Like telemetry? I begrudgingly accept it, because I trust them as my browser vendor. They're what I consciously and explicitly chose.
Nope, telemetry doesn't count. Do you know why? Because the browser informed you that they were collecting telemetry with a small bottom message, giving you the option to turn it off if you wanted.
In other words, they asked you for your consent.
Now, please answer the question.
Bruv, I'm not gonna lie to you. My mental capacity for this argument expired with my sleep. It's a new day, I moved on.
Fair enough. Good discussion. Have a nice day.
I actually really enjoyed it to be honest. I'm definitely gonna be keeping an eye out for your posts in the future. Even if I disagree with you, it's good to see high quality reasoned discussion.