Today, we’re unveiling Anonym Private Audiences: a confidential computing solution allowing advertisers to securely build new audiences and boost campaign results.
Omg. Again? Will they never learn? Their users do not want ads at all. But they are proving again and again they became just an ad company.
Check Librewolf or Ironfox on android.
And why is it that people don’t want to see any ads at all? Some people argue that ads can help you discover products and services you might want to buy? Well, I tried that.
Got a separate computer just for this experiment. Installed Chrome, used online services that have ads etc. I exposed myself to tracking and ads for a while, and the ads I saw on that computer are still completely irrelevant. I’ve even told some sites exactly what I like, and the ad targeting still sucks.
Nobody benefits from this, except for the ad companies. Advertisers loose their money, and they get no sales in return (at least not from mme). Ad companies and related platforms get the money for showing me stuff I will never buy, while the ads infuriate me at every turn.
Even in the best case scenario where the ad companies have all of my data, they still can’t figure out what I might want to buy. The whole idea of ads is just completely broken. On my other computers where I actually do more serious stuff, I use every tool in my arsenal to block all of this digital cancer.
That’s exactly what I use!
It has been shown repeatedly that “differential privacy” can be exploited to de-anonymize the users whose data has been aggregated.
If you read Mozilla’s description of their Private Audiences system you immediately ask, “what happens if an advertiser has an audience comprising a list of ‘known opposition party supporters’ and generates a new ‘audience’ based on that profile? Do they then get an expanded list of opposition party supporters to target?” Yes of course they do, because that’s entirely the purpose of this system.
Waving their hands and saying it uses ephemeral machine learning models and differential privacy does not solve the inherent societal problems with allowing targeted advertising.
Firefox: We’re the “privacy” browser
Also Firefox: But I’m sure they won’t mind if we shamelessly erode that privacy. Just a little, and we can always gaslight them into thinking people asked for it.
For those who haven’t read the article, the suggested solution is for advertisers to obtain similar user IDs by using their own user list; it has nothing to do with gathering user data from the browser.
It is utilized in conjunction with other differential privacy technologies that gather user information and classify users.
In fairness, Mozilla needs a means of making money if anyone hopes Firefox or Librewolf to exist in the long run.
Mozilla needs a means of making money if anyone hopes Firefox or Librewolf to exist in the long run.
Mozilla Corp needs a means of making money if they want to continue paying their directors millions of dollars a year. The software projects, not so much.
Yes, Mozilla makes enough from search engine royalties to perform its original mission. But it got too much money from those royalties and bloated itself into a lumbering hydra.
In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:
- Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
- Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
- There is no 3.
Anything that supports the surveillance capitalist economy is just fuelling the continued exploitation of our attention and private data. Get to fuck, Mozilla CORP.
If Google does not implement this, then most won’t care (unfortunately). I think this is a great idea and concept by Mozilla, but it needs to be adopted and respected widely to be effective.
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