There’s been a lot of discussion over the weekend about the origin trial for a private attribution prototype in Firefox 128. It’s clear in retrospect that we should have communicated more on this one, and so I wanted to take a minute to explain our thinking and clarify a few things. I figured I’d post this here on Reddit so it’s easy for folks to ask followup questions. I’ll do my best to address them, though I’ve got a busy week so it might take me a bit.
The Internet has become a massive web of surveillance, and doing something about it is a primary reason many of us are at Mozilla. Our historical approach to this problem has been to ship browser-based anti-tracking features designed to thwart the most common surveillance techniques. We have a pretty good track record with this approach, but it has two inherent limitations.
First, in the absence of alternatives, there are enormous economic incentives for advertisers to try to bypass these countermeasures, leading to a perpetual arms race that we may not win. Second, this approach only helps the people that choose to use Firefox, and we want to improve privacy for everyone.
This second point gets to a deeper problem with the way that privacy discourse has unfolded, which is the focus on choice and consent. Most users just accept the defaults they’re given, and framing the issue as one of individual responsibility is a great way to mollify savvy users while ensuring that most peoples’ privacy remains compromised. Cookie banners are a good example of where this thinking ends up.
Whatever opinion you may have of advertising as an economic model, it’s a powerful industry that’s not going to pack up and go away. A mechanism for advertisers to accomplish their goals in a way that did not entail gathering a bunch of personal data would be a profound improvement to the Internet we have today, and so we’ve invested a significant amount of technical effort into trying to figure it out.
The devil is in the details, and not everything that claims to be privacy-preserving actually is. We’ve published extensive analyses of how certain otherproposals in this vein come up short. But rather than just taking shots, we’re also trying to design a system that actually meets the bar. We’ve been collaborating with Meta on this, because any successful mechanism will need to be actually useful to advertisers, and designing something that Mozilla and Meta are simultaneously happy with is a good indicator we’ve hit the mark.
This work has been underway for several years at the W3C’s PATCG, and is showing real promise. To inform that work, we’ve deployed an experimental prototype of this concept in Firefox 128 that is feature-wise quite bare-bones but uncompromising on the privacy front. The implementation uses a Multi-Party Computation (MPC) system called DAP/Prio (operated in partnership with ISRG) whose privacy properties have been vetted by some of the best cryptographers in the field. Feedback on the design is always welcome, but please show your work.
The prototype is temporary, restricted to a handful of test sites, and only works in Firefox. We expect it to be extremely low-volume, and its purpose is to inform the technical work in PATCG and make it more likely to succeed. It’s about measurement (aggregate counts of impressions and conversions) rather than targeting. It’s based on several years of ongoing research and standards work, and is unrelated to Anonym.
The privacy properties of this prototype are much stronger than even some garden variety features of the web platform, and unlike those of most other proposals in this space, meet our high bar for default behavior. There is a toggle to turn it off because some people object to advertising irrespective of the privacy properties, and we support people configuring their browser however they choose. That said, we consider modal consent dialogs to be a user-hostile distraction from better defaults, and do not believe such an experience would have been an improvement here.
Digital advertising is not going away, but the surveillance parts could actually go away if we get it right. A truly private attribution mechanism would make it viable for businesses to stop tracking people, and enable browsers and regulators to clamp down much more aggressively on those that continue to do so.
I mean most of us got it, even those that pretended not to. But a post like this would've definitely been better before hand. This is what I mean when I say Mozilla are hostile to community now, they're so happy to needlessly hide shit behind Figma links, that when something like this would've been challenged, they would've made a blog post before the roll out. It's like with the hiding of sub directories in the URL bar of Firefox for Android, it sucks and people would've said beforehand, but nope hidden behind Figma. The community are there to assist, embrace them so you (Mozilla, not OP) stop fucking up please.
Edit: Also Mozilla stop running to Reddit when Lemmy is here. Where is the support for the open web?
Yeah it was a bit weird they didn't talk about it before. Bit it was obviously pretty experimental being in nightly.
(it's always kinda weird so many Firefox users sit on nightly, then complain about random unannounced or unfinished changes, when that's kinda what they explicitly sign up for 🤷)
I wouldn't call this a useful post. It is just corporate speak with no real meaning other than trying to calm people. I think they are looking for more income.
Income from where? They've taken a W3C proposal and implemented it. It's that simple. People are on here acting outraged because they can't be bothered to read and that's saddening. I'm seeing people upset that Meta are involved. Like guess what? The type of people this affects are the type of people that visit Facebook. There's tonnes of things to be upset about regarding Mozilla. The timing of this post and the location of the post are both perfectly reasonable, the content however isn't.
Whatever opinion you may have of advertising as an economic model, it’s a powerful industry that’s not going to pack up and go away.
Fuck that. Not if we don't make it. That's precisely the point. Do not comply. Do not submit. Never. Advertising is contrary to the interests of humanity. You're never going to convince me becoming a collaborator for a hypothetically less pernicious form is the right course of action. Never. No quarter.
We’ve been collaborating with Meta on this,
That makes it even worse.
any successful mechanism will need to be actually useful to advertisers,
And therefore inimical to humanity in general and users in particular.
Digital advertising is not going away,
Not with that attitude.
but the surveillance parts could actually go away
Aggregate surveillance is still surveillance. It is still intrusive, it still leverages aggregate human behaviour in order to harm humans by convincing them to do things against their own interest and in the interest of the advertiser.
This is supposedly an experiment. You've decided to run an experiment on users without consent. And you still think this is the right thing--since you claim the default is the correct behaviour.
I will disable it too, but they are right. Mozilla is not in a position to fight the ad industry, alone, and being funded by a ad company (Google).
Best they can do is try to increase the privacy while the ad industry makes money from us. The ad industry is a fucking cancer and I would make them illegal tomorrow if I could. But we are here, on a dense planet called earth, living during the capitalism era. It's like the stone age.
I don't blame Mozilla for not single-handedly ending advertising online. That's too much to expect from anyone. But they could at least avoid active collaboration with the enterprise. And if they're going to engage in it, they should at the very least warn their users.
They aren't fighting it single handedly. They have a massive community that is ready to help. However, Firefox has cut off the privacy community as they are more of a telemetry machine with ads for Mozilla products.
Mozilla is not in a position to fight the ad industry
Especially not when they're now officially a part of said industry.
I am not even sure who "we" is in that statement they made:
First, in the absence of alternatives, there are enormous economic incentives for advertisers to try to bypass these countermeasures, leading to a perpetual arms race that we may not win.
Is it "we, the advertising network owners" or "we, the users fighting against the advertising networks"?
If you've got a better solution then feel free to share, but magically making everybody on Earth simultaneously decide to suddenly stop paying attention to all advertising everywhere forever is not an actual solution.
Same attitude as the people who are like "universal income should be a norm" and "dismantle US healthcare". Like yes I agree, but you can't just turn off an entire industry overnight. It takes years, if not decades to change.
Then when incremental progress is made they shut on it for not doing enough.
I'm all for removing fossil fuel use, but removing 20% here and there is a lot better than rejecting everything. It's juvenile to me to think that it's either gone or it's not, and it's the same here. Ads aren't going away, it's a naive thought to think they will. What we can do is try to make changes here and there to make it more tolerable.
I don't have a complete solution, but I have a vector, and this is in the opposite direction, being, according to its own claims useful to advertisers.
The solution passes through many things, but probably has to start by changing the perception of advertising as a necessary nuisance and into a needless, avoidable, and unacceptable evil. Collaboration does not help in this regard. Individual actions such as blocking advertising, refusing to accept any tracking from sites, deploying masking tools, using archives and mirrors to get content, consciously boycott any product that manages to escape the filtering, are good but insufficient.
Whatever opinion you may have of advertising as an economic model, it’s a powerful industry that’s not going to pack up and go away.
Fuck that. Not if we don’t make it. That’s precisely the point. Do not comply. Do not submit. Never. Advertising is contrary to the interests of humanity. You’re never going to convince me becoming a collaborator for a hypothetically less pernicious form is the right course of action. Never. No quarter.
Advertisement is not the actual problem, as long as it is marked as such. The problem Mozilla tries to fight is advertisements with tracking users. I find it much more problematic to have advertisements disguised as normal content. Besides malicious advertisements, but that is not the problem that is fought here. People who don't want see ads, can still use blockers. That's your option (and mine I use it). But it won't solve the problem of people getting tracked in mass. If Firefox can provide such as solution, then it is better than not having it.
Edit: Added quote to show what I am replying to, as you edited in other parts after my reply.
This is supposedly an experiment. You’ve decided to run an experiment on users without consent. And you still think this is the right thing–since you claim the default is the correct behaviour.
I 100% agree with this one with you. And it is inexcusable. Edit: I agree to 90% here, because they don't claim the default is the correct behavior, but more that the default is the recommended and most likely working option for most users; some kind of lowest common denominator. But I get your point here, so still highly agreeable.
If you got your way, the vast majority of the Internet would disappear together with the advertising. The Internet runs on advertising. If it stops being viable, so does the Internet as a whole. How do you think all these free services are funded?
The trick is to take the privacy violating and tracking part out of it. If you block ads, that doesn't matter. If a few tech savvy people do, it doesn't matter. If literally everyone does, it suddenly matters a lot.
Of course they are working with one of the advertising giants, that's the point. That's who the solution is for. If none of them would accept it, it might as well not exist.
the vast majority of the internet is shit, it's a slurry of Content from content farms designed to top google search results or go viral on social media. if all that were to disappear then the internet would absolutely become a better place
This is just a continuation of the slow death of Mozilla. They need to seriously rethink a lot of things. There are ways to make it profitable and still protect privacy and freedom. For instance, they could work on private digital cash like Taler or they could sell merch.
Sure, you do that. The rest of us are trying to have a functioning society and solve actual problems, so as long as you don't get into anyones way, fine, do whatever you want.
Doesn't solve any problems, but at least you get to feel perfectly vindicated I suppose.
Targeted advertising is all about finding exploiting weaknesses. It is part of the dark side of technology where the computer is just a slot machine. I don't think it is a stretch to say it is bad for humanity
designing something that Mozilla and Meta are simultaneously happy with is a good indicator we’ve hit the mark.
I think that's true. I trust Mozilla, based on their statements and their actions, and I distrust Facebook for those same reasons. Compromise is the only path forward, despite those who argue we should reject anything that's not perfect.
I wish I could believe that, but corporations (esp. Meta) cant and wont limit themselves. Corporations dont have any other purpose than gathering wealth and will always try to get more. Working with them only sets back privacy concerns because they cant care as long as there is money available to try to get. That is why we need a strong government regulatory system back. Regulations is what brought corps under control in the 1900s and it is what we need now. Strong privacy laws and regulatory agencies.
Apologist mentality. Mozilla made a shitty decision because they're sellouts and aren't worth defending. Advertisers provide nothing of value, and deserve nothing. There is nothing to compromise on. What happened to this community. People should know better, having migrated from a platform that sold out to advertisers and that's a large part of the reason why it's shit.
There goes brave Mozilla, sacrificing its reputation for the good of us all. Jumping into bed with the ad industry in the hopes that later on it might have the chance to whisper sweetly in their ear and ask them to stop molesting the Internet so much.
Could someone please provide an archived link to the reddit thread?
Apparently I'm IP banned or something because reddit is entirely blocked for me (which is a weird development since I haven't logged into my account there in over a year)