Mozilla Welcomes Anonym: Privacy Preserving Digital Advertising | The Mozilla Blog
blog.mozilla.org
Mozilla has acquired Anonym, a trailblazer in privacy-preserving digital advertising. This strategic acquisition enables Mozilla to help raise the bar for
  • sylver_dragon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    77·
    5 months ago

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

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

    • trevor@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      22·
      5 months ago

      Servo cannot come soon enough. And yet… it’s so far from being even close to ready for real usage.

  • drspod@lemmy.ml
    51·
    5 months ago

    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.

      • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1411·
        5 months ago

        They do need to earn some money after all

        If every ad-supported website went dark today, nothing of value would be lost.

        • kevincox@lemmy.ml
          172·
          5 months ago

          I don’t agree. As a single counter example of many YouTube has a huge wealth of information and content.

          Maybe that value isn’t worth the ads, that is much harder to say for certain. But it is clear that there is some valuable information on some sites that are supported by ads.

        • /home/pineapplelover@lemm.ee
          9·
          5 months ago

          Duckduckgo manages to have privacy respecting ads. I really value that. If you’re searching cars, cars pop up, they don’t look at your history or anything else. Unobtrusive and you can look away

          • pizzaboi@lemm.eeEnglish
            8·
            5 months ago

            And you can just… Turn them off. No questions asked. DuckDuckGo is a great example of how an advertising company can be both financially viable and respecting of user-choice.

            Google could let users choose to opt out of seeing any ads across their network for free today and still be one of the most profitable companies in existence. A huge percentage of users wouldn’t know or care to turn ads off, another percentage actually wants them, and for advanced users they could offer more advanced, useful features for money.

            But try pitching that to stakeholders and upper-management lol

        • Syn_Attck@lemmy.today
          510·
          5 months ago

          That’s a nice thought.

          Then you suddenly realize no one knows up from down or down from up. Society would shift on such a massive scale people would probably just stick their smartphones in a drawer and only use them to message people they already know personally and check them a few times a day like an answering machine.

          Then suddenly you realize you haven’t heard about Ukraine, Russia, Israel or Palestine in months. It’s November 28th and you heard someone mention a ‘new president’ but you didn’t even vote. Shit, you forgot to vote. There were no social media or news websites reminding you about the election and you didn’t have it on your new wall calendar yet! Ah that’s what all those “Vote Now!!!” yard signs were about, fuck…

          It’s a nice thought, but the internet is powered by ads. (Almost?) Every subscription-supported website is also ad-supported. The internet would basically go under. AFAIK all the Lemmy apps have ads too. It’d be a nice change to get back to get a force shove back to the early-mid 90’s. Maybe we’d do things differently. People would certainly be outside talking to each other a lot more.

          • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
            122·
            5 months ago

            This sounds like the kind of thing a Zoomer who has no memory of life before the Internet – or the Internet of the '90s before the advertisers got a hold of it, for that matter – would write.

            AFAIK all the Lemmy apps have ads too.

            LOL, nope. Try getting your apps from F-Droid instead of the Google Play Store.

            • fiercekitten@lemm.eeEnglish
              10·
              5 months ago

              Genuine questions: If we get rid of all the ads, how do news companies get funded? Information can be freely copied and redistributed online – including all news articles. How would our favorite tech sites be funded?

              I’ll be honest, I donate every chance I get to support devs for the awesome free software and services they provide, but news is different. I don’t actually pay for any news. It comes from so many sources. What’s the best financial model for news companies in a capitalist society? As a consumer, what’s the ethical model for paying for or consuming news?

            • Syn_Attck@lemmy.today
              51·
              5 months ago

              This sounds like the kind of thing a Zoomer who has no memory of life before the Internet – or the Internet of the '90s before the advertisers got a hold of it, for that matter – would write.

              To clear that up, I’m coming up on 40. We got our first family computer with a 56k modem in 1995. I’m not saying ads are a good thing, I’m telling you that 99% of websites are ad-powered.

              Back then companies had websites as a novelty, or way to find information about their company. All the newspapers that had websites were simply putting their major articles on the internet as a bonus, and as a business strategy to push subscriptions for their physical paper. Most everyone still purchased a subscription to their physical newspapers and magazines. Now, basically nobody has a newspaper or magazine subscription unless it’s online, but most people still don’t… The tech savvy use archive.ph and similar, and the old and non tech-savvy use their 3-article limit and might buy a month subscription to read an article they really have to read, or maybe even a year like the old days, but most don’t pay for a subscription at all, and that’s where the ads come in.

              However, since social media has become the dominant news-spreading mechanism, many or most don’t even read articles. They read headlines and talk shit or ask questions in the comments section, of things which were answered in the article. In the 90s those people would be reading the articles as something to do, and to stay somewhat informed. Today, their smartphone would ding or buzz before they finished the first article.

              P.S. I’m Degoogled and use Graphene without GSF on my main profile so I use Aurora, Neo Store, and F-Droid. Currently using Boost installed with Aurora. What’s a good recommendation for a good, fast, FOSS Lemmy client that doesn’t show ads that I can get with F-Droid?

  • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
    361·
    5 months ago

    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

    • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
      22·
      5 months ago

      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

    • neo@lemy.lol
      6·
      5 months ago

      Basically I see two options:

      1. 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.

      2. 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.

  • antihumanitarian@lemmy.worldEnglish
    351·
    5 months ago

    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.

      • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
        5·
        5 months ago

        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

        • nasi_goreng@lemmy.zip
          2·
          5 months ago

          I mean for digital content. I live in Indonesia, and majority of people cannot afford to pay digital service, but an ads of foods or essential stuff works.

  • CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml
    262·
    5 months ago

    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.

    • SomeGuy69@lemmy.world
      5·
      5 months ago

      I just switched to Firefox to get away from Browser who prevent me from using an adblocker extension. sigh

  • GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml
    20·
    5 months ago

    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.

  • RustyNova@lemmy.world
    19·
    5 months ago

    Let’s just hope that they won’t use it as a justification to put ads in your browser, or go the brave route.

  • Eggyhead@lemmy.worldEnglish
    17·
    5 months ago

    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.

  • sunzu@kbin.run
    101·
    5 months ago

    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.

    • AJ Sadauskas@aus.social
      6·
      5 months ago

      @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…

  • IllNess@infosec.pub
    8·
    5 months ago

    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.

  • Unskilled5117@feddit.de
    169·
    5 months ago

    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?

    • neo@lemy.lol
      13·
      5 months ago

      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.

      • Unskilled5117@feddit.de
        51·
        5 months ago

        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.

    • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
      73·
      5 months ago

      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.

        • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
          61·
          5 months ago

          Go ask Wikipedia about their business model. Or the Linux kernel. Or any number of other Free Software projects that neither charge users a fee nor show ads.

          • Syn_Attck@lemmy.today
            5·
            5 months ago

            Those are not businesses. They are free projects which a dedicated person (or group of people) donate their time and energy to produce.

            Wikipedia has their semi-annual donation drives and many (not most, but enough worth mentioning) FOSS devs are salaried by companies like Google and Microsoft and are allowed to work on patches to out-of-scope projects on company time provided they’re still fulfilling their main roles. There are also Liberapay, Open Collective, Ko-fi and such but for the majority of FOSS devs not funded by large corps, just developing a large and widely-used program because they want to, donations rarely ever cover as much as they would make at a 9-5. There are also nonprofits that distribute donations to FOSS devs. For most it is a money pit, but to them the passion is worth more. They do it for the love, not the money.

            These are not businesses.

            • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
              41·
              5 months ago

              Those are not businesses. They are free projects which a dedicated person (or group of people) donate their time and energy to produce.

              …and? That’s what makes them the best part of the Internet!

              For most it is a money pit, but to them the passion is worth more. They do it for the love, not the money.

              And it doesn’t stop them from existing, proving that the Internet does not actually have to run on profit.

      • Unskilled5117@feddit.de
        32·
        5 months ago

        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“

          • Kayn@dormi.zone
            2·
            5 months ago

            We can cherry-pick projects too.

            Lemmy barely gets enough donations to fund a single developer.

            core-js, one of the largest JavaScript libraries, was cussed out for even having the audacity to ask for donations.

            Donations aren’t the steady source of income you seem to be thinking they are.

          • Unskilled5117@feddit.de
            32·
            5 months ago

            Again you ignore words like “often”. There certainly are projects that are doing extremely well, and I am happy for them, i am one of those donating.

            Yet you ignore the funding problem that exists in open source. You can’t make it go away by naming a few that have done well for themselves. Even those that are doing well enough, what could they achieve, if they had comparable funding to bigger players that are advertising? I am not saying that it’s the option that everybody should go for, but if one chooses to, i would like it to be privacy respecting, and thats where hopefully mozilla will come in. And outside of opensource, on a “normal” persons phone, how many apps are funded via ads? Wouldn’t it be great if those were privacy preserving instead? It’s a step in the right direction.

            I will stop replying to you, as you don’t seem mature enough to hold a respectful discussion, without trying to frame my opinions as trying to be manipulative.