Mozilla Welcomes Anonym: Privacy Preserving Digital Advertising

i don't wanna see another ad on the web in my life, so i'll just keep on using ublock.

Yeah pretty much. The privacy invasion of ad companies is terrible for sure, but the whole seeing ads all over the damn place in the first place is also annoying enough that even if they were somehow completely tracker-free I would still block them.

Passwords?!
Yeah, that and usernames are a big nope from me.
I'm not opposed to the idea of privacy-oriented advertising, but it needs to be:
local only - no service, including Mozilla, can correlate me to ads being shown; advertisers and Mozilla can only know broad stats
opt-in - ideally it would replace ads on websites, not add ads, and ad-block should continue to be effective; I'm willing to disable ad-block if a site opts-in to privacy-friendly ads (my concern is tracking, I don't mind them getting paid)
auditable - I should be able to see why certain ads are being shown, and verify that none of that metadata leaves my computer
THEY USE GOOGLE ON YOUR DATA.
Again, big nope from me. I hope Mozilla significantly changes how they operate and only uses their talent to build something actually privacy-focused. That's a pretty big ask, so I'm not optimistic.
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It's so much worse than I thought, and I already hated it.
For a company who has a whole schtick going where they read and critique other companies' privacy policies, this is pretty ludicrous.
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Is it done locally? On their servers? Who knows.
You know it's on their servers. 🙂 Otherwise they would be beating so much around the bush.
That’s the only way to offer free services?! What about donation-based models? Maybe Mozilla could have set up something like what Brave has, except not based around a sketchy cryptocurrency.
Please correct me if I'm mistaken, but I thought Brave only gave donatable tokens to users as a reward for watching ads... ads which Brave curated for the user based on their activity. It's just targeted ad revenue with extra steps.
At first blush, it seems to me that both Brave and Anonym want to be the middleman for targeted advertising. What am I missing?
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I am a little disgusted by this because now both major browser engines are being developed by an advertising company, creating more incentives for future web technologies that strengthen tracking and undermine ad blocking.

From what I understand, this is an anonymized targeted ad company. In other words, ads are still targeted to the individual user, it is just harder for the advertiser to track (or profile) an individual user. Are there any companies still doing untargeted ads, ads where the advertiser might pick what site their ad goes on but cannot target a specific user demographic?

Stolen from r*ddit, this is what the option looks like in the config (already in beta/dev channel)

also stolen from r*ddit: "Anonym was founded in 2022 by former Meta executives Brad Smallwood and Graham Mudd."

Librewolf is the new Firefox
Change my mind

I wonder if the process is open source or we just take their word that it's privacy preserving. Anyway, privacy is not the only problem with online advertising, so I'm not going to give up adblocking any time soon.

It's just an advertising company that knows to throw in some buzzwords.

Anonym was founded in 2022 by former Meta executives [...]. The company was backed by [various venture capital corporations and multiple] strategic individual investors.

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- Wow, lots of red on that page using that bookmarklet...
- Is there a way for one to use this on android FF?
  Edit:
  Found one. Bookmarking the following(got it from view-source:) worked:
  javascript:(function(){var d=document,s=d.createElement('script');s.crossOrigin='anonymous';s.src='https://unpkg.com/@mourner/bullshit@1.3.0/bullshit.js';d.body.appendChild(s);}())
  Websites that helped:
  https://paul.kinlan.me/use-bookmarklets-on-chrome-on-android/
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/63614702/bookmarklet-functionality-missing-in-firefox-android#63620174
  Thanks for sharing the link

Advertising can't be privacy preserving. What gives advertisement value is the fact that it's targeted.

Contextual ads can be privacy preserving. As in Netflix ads in a entertainment page. The problem is targeting the ad on people, and not on content.

Great

I love how Mozilla seems to be trying so hard to kill itself. You don't see Google marketing Chrome as the browser that serves you ads and sends back telemetry.

Not the first time Mozilla has done something like this. In 2017, Mozilla stealthily installed a tracking and advertising plugin called Cliqz on a small number of German user's computers, which provided users with targeted ads, with very similar language to what Mozilla is currently trying to incorporate with Anonym.

Bollocks

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

This is why i am not giving another penny to Mozilla ever again

i really wish i could donate to just firefox and not mozilla, I just want firefox to be better and not to spend money on all these weird things.
- Don't worry, they can make plenty of money off of you (stock settings of course)

JS compatible browsers that actually respect your privacy:

Mozilla is not your friend, and they're not saving the web from Google

You forgot Librewolf and Waterfox
- why I didn't list librewolf or waterfox
The biggest problem with the alternative browsers I wanted to use is, that they are not managed by my distribution (repository).
- What distribution are you using? Every distro I've tried, even the more obscure ones (alpine, void, openbsd), package most of the webkit/webengine browsers.

Terrible news

good cop bad cop

bad cop worse cop

leftist liberal capitalist
Left leaning liberals?
Leftists are generally not called capitalists, right?