5 mo. ago • 96%

Mozilla Welcomes Anonym: Privacy Preserving Digital Advertising

blog.mozilla.org Mozilla Welcomes Anonym: Privacy Preserving Digital Advertising | The Mozilla Blog

Mozilla has acquired Anonym, a trailblazer in privacy-preserving digital advertising. This strategic acquisition enables Mozilla to help raise the bar for

52 comments

By combining Mozilla’s scale and trusted reputation with Anonym’s cutting-edge technology....

Ya, that reputation is taking a big hit right now.

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Smells like there's BIG enshittification ahead...

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- Servo cannot come soon enough. And yet... it's so far from being even close to ready for real usage.
  
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I, for one, do not welcome any form of advertising.

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I've been using Firefox since the beginning, before that Mozilla, and before that Netscape Navigator.

But I think it's finally time to switch to Librewolf.

I don't want digital advertising of any kind, even if my privacy is "preserved" through fancy data-laundering.

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- They could just use non-personalized ads instead tbh. They do need to earn some money after all
  
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  They do need to earn some money after all
  
  If every ad-supported website went dark today, nothing of value would be lost.
  
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Here’s how it works:

Secure Environment: Data sets are matched in a highly secure environment, ensuring advertisers, publishers, and Anonym don’t access any user level data.

Anonymized Analytics: The process results in anonymized insights and models, helping advertisers measure and improve campaign performance while safeguarding consumer privacy.

Differential Privacy Algorithms: These algorithms add “noise” to the data, protecting it from being traced back to individual users.

Okay. It's still boils down to give us all the data and trust us. But hopefully they're more trustworthy than other people, and not corrupted by influence and money like other humans are?

By combining Mozilla’s scale and trusted reputation with Anonym’s cutting-edge technology, we can enhance user privacy and advertising effectiveness, leveling the playing field for all stakeholders.

I was surprised they said they're so explicitly, but yeah they're trying to monetize the Mozilla reputation for things that I'm not sure stick to their core philosophy
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- To me, this only makes sense if it's integrated advertising in the browser. Trying to get third party websites to use their advertising network probably will be a very difficult sale.
  
  It could be a way of greenwashing, or whatever the expression is for privacy washing, businesses like meta, Google, by letting them license a "privacy friendly" advertisement platform.
  
  As far as I'm aware, there's only two major online advertising platforms, meta and Google. So breaking in is a third platform would be difficult, unless they could integrate into apps directly through Mozilla's app footprint
  
  https://www.anonymco.com/
  
  driving advertising performance requires privacy-enhancing approaches to data driven marketing. Anonym’s privacy preserving solutions allow you to take full advantage of your data assets.
  
  Fundamentally, privacy and data-driven marketing are diametrically opposed
  
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  Fundamentally, privacy and data-driven marketing are diametrically opposed
  
  This is so true
  
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- Basically I see two options:
  
  This works for advertisers and based on your "profile" you are strongly influenced by the ads shown to you. So might just as well give your data to Meta and Google, who already sell profiled (and not individualised) ads.
  
  This doesn't work for advertisers and you are not strongly influence by the ads shown to you. So the advertisers could just as well put a link somewhere and hope it is found by their target audience.
  
  Also I don't my browser, my OS or any other core component on my system to be in bed with people who are trying to extract as much money as possible from me.
  
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  100%. Conflict of interest is a very real problem
  
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- Sounds like Chrome's Privacy Sandbox.
  
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- That doesn’t make me feel better.
  
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Well this is a tremendous step in the wrong direction. The economic problem is the ad supported model in the first place, no matter how it's run. This is the same thing Google does, they keep user data to themselves and sell the ad placement. So now Mozilla has the same economic incentives as Google. Unfathomably bad move.

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- In reality ads might be able to serve undeserved community, like countries that majority of people cannot affort paying internet service.
  
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  It would be nice if this were true, but typically if the population doesn't have money to spend to buy things, advertising to them doesn't return much money either
  
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Bla bla bla …… advertising … bla bla bla For me advertising = Block

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Mozilla is going to absolute shit lately. Partnering with a fucking ad network? You've got to be kidding me. Firefox is still the better browser, but it's time to abandon Firefox proper for forks that get rid of Mozilla's bullshit. I have been using Librewolf for a while and unlike Firefox, it's not adware.

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- I just switched to Firefox to get away from Browser who prevent me from using an adblocker extension. sigh
  
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Let's just hope that they won't use it as a justification to put ads in your browser, or go the brave route.

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Data anonymization is a good thing. If websites start using this solution instead of Google ads that'd be quite good. Well better than Google at least. But people seem to be afraid of ads getting added into Firefox. If it happens it will be a ticking bomb because the hunger for data and profit will rise every day.

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An argument I frequently make about using an ad blocker is that I’d be more comfortable with ads if they weren’t so thirsty for personal information. I still stand by that, and I’m not completely convinced this satisfies that concern. Personal data is still getting slurped up, but now we have the privilege of trusting it’s completely anonymized.

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Timing is a bit sus... While google making chrome straight up ad serving client .... Firefox does something shiti?

Collusion or not, can't even get the clock is broken twice a day from these "businesses" jfc

These people never skip a time to fuck the user.

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- @sunzu @dvdnet62 Oh come now. If there's one thing Mozilla doesn't need anyone's help with, it's shooting itself in the foot with its own gun.
  
  Now excuse me, I have some Pocket articles to read on my Firefox OS phone...
  
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I'm going to hope for the best and assume this has nothing to do with their browser. Mozilla has a lot of other products.

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for anybody that wants to disable it, go to the settings and search for "Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement"

(or through the dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled flag in about:config)

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution

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While there are a lot of critics of this, ask yourself: for how many services and apps you use (e.g. messenger, cloud storage, email, operating system, web browser…) are you willing to pay recurrently? If that answer is not for every single one of them, then this move is the answer.

The internet desperately needs a way to fund things and advertising seems to be the only viable solution on a bigger scale. And I don’t think that there is anyone better suited than mozilla for the job of pushing a privacy respecting way of doing so. Sure this needs to be done the right way, but they should be given the benefit of the doubt.

And this doesn’t mean that everything needs to be cluttered with ads. You could still pay a bit to remove them.

Even if the answer to the question above was yes, consider the masses. Other people might not care enough/have the same awareness about privacy to pay, but they could gain a lot with this. Consider people in less fortunate circumstances monetary wise. Don’t they deserve privacy if they can’t afford to pay for services?

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- There are radio stations, financed through ads. And they check if people are listening by calling random persons to ask them what station they are listening to.
  
  So this is a viable business model and nobody is stopping anybody from putting plain pictures and links on sites and just estimate the page visits, but online advertisers want to know more. They always want more.
  
  At the same time, a browser is the essential software to browse the web. So this is as if your TV was like:
  
  Yo, many people mute their TV during commercials and don't pay attention, which kills the poor networks. So I made a deal with advertisers and will check what your doing, while I provide unmutable ads , but don't worry, your privacy is very important to us and we only care about providing to you the best TV experience possible.
  
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  So do i understand it correctly, that ads are ok for you, but not targeted ads, because the advertisers always want to know more? Then that seems to be what mozilla is trying to achieve here: to limit what advertisers can know about you.
  
  The technology for targeted ads are already in place, this could be an alternative that preserves more privacy than current ad networks.
  
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- It is a bullshit false dichotomy to claim that the only options for business models are charging fees or showing ads. Knock it off with the misinformation.
  
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  What are your suggestions besides ads and subscriptions, professor?
  
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  Thats why i said “seems“ to be and „on a bigger scale“ to allow for other options. But those other options like through donations(=paying them) are often not enough. Apparently you don’t see opensource developers struggling and choose to just ignore the reality. You also fail to point out other options that scale as well as advertising does. As you seem to have the solution that many people struggle to find, feel free to actually tell us about it. I only expressed my opinion not „misinformation“. Your comment on the other hand failed to provide any arguments to further the discussion. So yeah “knock it off“
  
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Fuck you Mozilla, if I see a single ad from you I'm off.

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