Mozilla Selling Out Firefox Users
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Erika Rowland ☛ Tools I Use: firefox
Firefox is my daily use browser. I’ve tried a number of browsers over the years, but I keep coming back to Firefox. Here’s a bunch of tools and features I use in Firefox: [...]
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Privacy Guides ☛ "Privacy-Preserving" Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us Yet Again
"No shady privacy policies or back doors for advertisers" proclaims the Firefox homepage, but that's no longer true in Firefox 128.
Less than a month after acquiring the AdTech company Anonym, Mozilla has added special software co-authored by Meta and built for the advertising industry directly to the latest release of Firefox, in an experimental trial you have to opt out of manually. This "Privacy-Preserving Attribution" (PPA) API adds another tool to the arsenal of tracking features that advertisers can use, which is thwarted by traditional content blocking extensions.
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[Repeat] Ruben Schade ☛ Disable Firefox 128’s latest adware “feature”
If you’re one of the few remaining people running Firefox, you’ve had a new feature enabled without your knowledge or consent. To disable:
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University of Toronto ☛ The Firefox source code's 'StaticPrefs' system (as of Firefox 128)
The news of the time interval is that Mozilla is selling out Firefox users once again (although Firefox remains far better than Chrome), in the form of 'Privacy-Preserving Attribution', which you might impolitely call 'browser managed tracking'. Mozilla enabled this by default in Firefox 128 (cf), and if you didn't know already you can read about how to disable it here or here. In the process of looking into all of this, I attempted to find where in the Firefox code the special dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled was actually used, but initially failed. Later, with guidance from @mcc's information, I managed to find the code and learned something about how Firefox handles certain 'about:config' preferences through a system called 'StaticPrefs'.
Update
Also new:
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You're too stupid for technology.
I've used "Firefox" for about 15 years, since it appeared in the early 2000s. Firefox is generally considered the least evil of the two leading web browsers. But like its rival Google Chrome, both are giant surveillance engines for scooping up data about your personal interests and behaviours and selling it to bad actors.
Firefox version 128, from the company that claims "No shady privacy policies or back doors for advertisers", now stealthily ships with "Privacy-Preserving Attribution" (PPA), an Orwellian name for simply tracking all your stuff but sending it via a centralised anonymising service. Mozilla's "announcement" consisted of two vague sentences buried at the bottom of the most recent release notes.
Worse, the technology is still labelled as "experimental", in other words it's full of bugs likely to cause a colossal breach at some point. And it's switched-on by default! I think what they really mean by "experimental" is tentative, pending the massive public outrage that will force them to withdraw it and apologise.
Lunduke:
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Mozilla Firefox Goes Anti-Privacy, Pro-Advertising
Mozilla is positioning itself as an Advertising and Artificial Intelligence company, and is actively sacrificing the security and privacy of Firefox users to be successful in that business.
Need proof of such an outlandish claim?
Look no further than the recent release of Firefox version 128... and the inclusion of "Privacy-Preserving Attribution".