that article going around abt firefox’s new ad program is annoying bc it’s phrased as though “mozilla has finally TURNED on its people and is SELLING YOU OUT for cold hard cash!!” when. that’s not what’s happening. it is specifically being implemented to discourage tracking behavior, and literally all the data they are giving to advertisers is aggregate and anonymized, which is like, the opposite of what that post wants you to worry about, lol
summary for those lacking energy/means to read the linked page:
- firefox has very strong anti-tracking protections
- advertisers keep trying to find ways around those protections
- instead of wasting time and resources fighting all the ways these problems pop up, firefox is trying to remove the need for advertisers to track you at all
- if you have this setting on, and you click on an ad (it’s only when you click on an ad and interact with the ad’s website - it’s not counting misclicks), firefox will make a note of it (this is only stored in your browser, firefox is not selling this part)
- firefox then encrypts all that data so it can’t be traced back to you, before sending those notes to people who count them up
- the advertisers will then periodically receive a report that says “hey, x amount of people clicked on your ad in this time frame. you can use this data to decide if this is the right place to put your ad”
- hopefully this will get the advertisers the information they want without having to tell them anything about your specific browser history
- if this still makes you uncomfortable, the way to opt out is very easy (go to settings -> privacy and security -> web advertising preferences, and uncheck all the boxes)
firefox is out here fighting the good fight guys. they’re the only browser that even slightly manages to stand up to chromium, but it’s a losing battle - spreading misinfo is just trying to sink the ship