Mozilla explains their recent foray into advertising - A free and open internet shouldn’t come at the expense of privacy

Neither are executive pay packages. In fact, they harm A LOT more people than one rich prick... So defend them if you want, but know that in doing so, you defend the very problem.

And yet here you are, insinuating the government should legislate monopoly power over advertisements and simply hand the reigns over to the corporate interests that want to maximize profits at any cost.

I have no idea where you got this idea I'm advocating for an adtech monopoly.

You continue to put words in my mouth and come at this thread with aggression and demanding statements. You dont just get to demand a debate, and you certinally aren't going to sway someone's opinion by putting someone on the defense, putting words in their mouth, and attacking character right out the gate. Edit: apologies, someone else was doing the more aggressive responses. Difficult to keep track of this stuff on mobile sometimes.

Dunno why you're being so aggressive about this.

My first comment that you replied to was primarily about how firefox getting more money through Mozilla being more successful would only serve to benefit forks like librewolf. Its a win-win for Firefox forks for firefox to be more popular and have more resources.

And I also commented about considering what Mozilla is stating their goal as to be a possible better state than the current situation and likely representing the best case, realistic scenario out of the US government in regards to ads and privacy. At rhe end of tje day, the default state of privacy is based on the US laws , bit that doesnt mean that more countries doing better on preivscu legislation otherwise won't help.

Instead, you are demanding answers from me. I wasn't here to argue. You could, idk, maybe do some of this leg work yourself rather than demand it from people? If this truly upsets you so much, maybe do something to more productively understand the situation rather than punch people around you who generally also want a more private future with less ads.

So by your silence, do you concede that Anonym provides no privacy not already provided...

What part about my description of Anonym was silence? You could maybe... Go to their site? Read some of the other Mozilla blog posts about it? I'd love more openness from them about how exactly their tools work, and I hope more is shared over time.

Why are you comparing it to Facebook pixels?

Maybe you dont know as much about advertising and tracking on the web as you think. Facebook sells a lot of ads through their sites and apps, but also hosted through clients sites. the data they track to know which ads to serve to eyeballs is gained through Facebook Pixel, which lots of people install on their web sites to gain analytics data from, which both tells facebook who you are when you are on one of their products and also tells other sites using pixel who you are to then target you while present from facebooks dataatores about your activity elsewhere. Putting it on your site also gives you some advantages for selling ads through Facebook, since it gives you targeted data about customers to your site so you can advertise to them where they are anywhere else on the internet. It's a self-sustaining network of ads > data > ads. Facebook pixel, by its ubiquitous nature, is everywhere which allows facebook to track people across websites to a high degree of accuracy. It's a big reason you may still feel targeted by ads despite being extremely privacy conscious and blocking ads nearly everywhere. Its just that level of ever-present.

Google analytics provides similar benefits to google for their ad network, it's just not as blatantly insidious since google doesnt really have a social network to drive more addictive advertising.

This is how targeted ads function. The ads dont have the data, its the other stuff that gets rhe data back to the ad network.

The only reason people use Firefox currently is that people used to trust Mozilla.

Don't let your bias color your opinion. That may be true of people on the privacy side of the fediverse but its certinally not the only reason people use firefox.

Since you can't name any reason Anonym is more private than Google Ads, people might as well go with a company that has vastly more expertise in cryptography and security.

See thats the thing: web users aren't the customers of facebook ads, google ads, anonym, and other ad companies. Businesses are. Businesses either care about being more private, or they care about the appearance of privacy, or they don't care at all. We as web users have no say in those decisions or priorities in most cases other than to make it such that advertising via trackers is unpopular, ineffective, or pushing to make it illegal.

If you spent some time reading about anonym instead of punching other people in the community, you might have noticed thay Anonym is looking to bypass tracking via tools like facebook pixel and instead using the data that a company has based on user registration, use of the product, etc. Then, they use ML to make assumptions without needing to resort to the level of data collection things like Facebook Pixel do. Plenty of information used to determine what ads to show to someone through detailed tracking can be just as effective as some educated guesses from context in data the company looking to sell ads already has from you being a customer or having provided some intentional information for sales and marketing use, which is exactly what ML is good at. If they truly can provide as good a value to people as Facebook Pixel + Facebook Ads or google analytics + google ads and other competotors without resorting ro invasive tracking, and especially if they can do it cheaper and give companies a marketing win to say they dont use trackers, then there is a chance the future of ads doesnt include tracking. Products being out in rhe market that work well without invading privacy also decreases rhe likliehood of lobbyists blowing up any bills thay would increase privacy. Or at least has way less of it. Its literally the goal of Anonym to provide ads without gaining targeted leads via trackers, but if you didn't already know that from easy, intentional research, then you aren't here to get answers, are you?

I'm not here to say Anonym is perfect or that no concerns are valid, but i am here to say that flipping tables and fragmenting the community further isnt going to help anyone. If firefox dies, so too do the forks, so theres reason to hope for the best here and not tilt at windmills.

It's one month later and I am back to reply:

I don't want to replace HTTP, or the web. But, I also absolutely don't want to build anything in greater complexity than what we have today. In other words, keep it for what it's doing now, but having an isolated app/container based platform efficiently served through a browser might just be a good thing for everyone?

5 years ago I was writing rust code compiled to web-assembly and then struggling to get it to run in a browser. I did that because I couldn't write an efficient enough version of whatever the algorithm I was following in javascript - probably on account of most things being objects. I got it to run eventually with decent enough performance, but it wasn't fun gluing all that mess together. I think if there was a better delivery platform for WASM built into browsers and maybe eventually mobile platforms, it would probably be better than today's approach to cross-platform apps being served via HTTP.