Firefox added ad tracking and has already turned it on without asking you

Can we please stop linking mastodon threads? Mozilla literally has an explainer article. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution

It's pretty painful how quickly wrong information spreads. I'm sure it's not intentional, but that doesn't really make it better...

I can say confidently that even if you don't conflate the two; the Mozilla implementation can be broken and abused just as easily as the Google one can be.

Interesting thread. But I don’t understand why the data needs to be collected and correlated by a third party, can’t the ads themselves detect views and clicks? (that’s what they need right?)

Or am I missing something about the process?

And none of the outraged people has actually described how information about you would actually be known to advertisers, so I don't see why people assume it will be.

Right riiight

It's not on mobile yet, it's only on specific websites, and as I understand it, it doesn't even do anything unless you click an ad.

Which is completely different from Chrome's system, which sends information about you to websites regardless - and they haven't even fenced off third-party cookies yet!

I'm wondering the same thing

I'd rather not have ads at all and just pay $5 a month and have all the websites I visit get a portion of that $5. Some people tried this years ago, but the payment infrastructure wasn't ready for it. Nostr can do it now though, their users "zapped" (tipped) nearly 1M USD (950k) over the past two months alone to content creators on their platform (twitter clone). And there's a feature to automatically split a set donation among all the posts you've liked. No reason that can't be done for the entire web. All instant, all with incredibly low fees, all payments made directly from you to the site you visited, no middlemen having to manage custody risk.

Browser extension tracks what sites I visit and then at the end of the month send them all tips. Sites could detect such an extension and automatically not show ads if you have it installed.

can't afford it

Here's a thicket of weeds: Why would you want to show ads to someone who can't afford your product?

wouldn't you rather see ads that at least somewhat match your interests

No, that means they're tracking me.

if they use a technique that moves some of the attribution logic that used to run on third-party servers to instead be done in your web browser?

The more of my data that stays on my system, the better. I'm not against ads or necessarily relevant ads, I'm against tracking.

Wouldn't you want to use a system that involves less tracking?

Yes. I'm willing to disable my ad blocker if they don't track me. If the browser places the ads and the only data that leaves my machine is deanonymized and can't reasonably be used to identify me, that's enough.

However, I'd much prefer to just pay whatever the revenue from the ads I see is. Unfortunately, most services are either $5-10/month to remove ads, and there's no way they make that much from me (it's probably <$1/month, if not per year). I wish Firefox would do something like GNU Taler where I can load up a fund and websites take a faction of a cent for each page view or something.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-ppm-dap#name-security-considerations

In theory this could be defeated easily if a fork of Firefox wanted to send lots of noise or someone decided to emulate many Firefox clients with false information.