- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
I think there is a big misunderstanding about this feature. People are throwing their arms up in disappointment but in reality this is a helpful feature for privacy.
This post doesn’t even explain what the feature is or how it works. If you take the time to go read what the feature actually does, you’ll see it’s a good feature to have and it really does improve your privacy when you don’t have an ad blocker.
Just because Meta participated doesn’t mean it’s bad. If they only participated as consultants to understand the advertisement system so they can better protect us against it, it’s not bad.
From my understanding of their implementation, you have to give a Mozilla server all of your traffic history, and then they feed a curated, sanitize topic list of that activity to the advertisers.
So now we’re trusting Mozilla with your full browsing history, that seems like a really bad idea. Even if I love and trust Mozilla, I don’t want to add yet another thing to the critical path
PPA does not involve sending information about your browsing activities to anyone. This includes Mozilla and our DAP partner (ISRG). Advertisers only receive aggregate information that answers basic questions about the effectiveness of their advertising.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-ppm-dap#name-security-considerations
The explicitly say if the aggregator is controlled by hostile party, and in my scenario that would be Mozilla, they could have full access to the deanonymized data. It’s out of scope for their protocol.
And while the DAP draft is nice, it doesn’t change my threat model, it just introduces extra steps. As the absolute hunger of AI inputs for models have shown us, if a company has the capability to get data, they will. Mozilla has demonstrated they are hungry for data and money. I don’t want to give them the capability
If you have syncing on, you are already trusting Mozilla with your history.
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All your data is encrypted on our servers so we can’t read it – only you can access it. We don’t sell your info to advertisers because that would go against our data privacy promise.
You are correct. My mistake.
Oh yeah, agreed, if your syncing then your security model doesn’t include worrying about tracking.
How are they different from any other VPN service or even uBlock? They all have access to your browsing info and can potentially use it for profit.
You think I don’t know how a VPN works?
I think you misunderstood what I meant.
I’m not clear on how this system works, but I would like to know how it’s supposedly better than Google’s Topics. Especially if, as comments elsewhere in the thread suggest, Mozilla’s solution involves potentially exposing your entire browsing history to someone. Topics doesn’t do that, since it’s entirely handled in your own browser and only sends vague categories. (And even fuzzes them by potentially sending a random category you didn’t actually visit.)
Please explain to me how sending additional data from your private computer to Mozilla servers gives me more privacy and not less.
It’s privacy preserving and you can turn it off. It’s the best option for attribution we have yet.
Why Mozilla, Why??
It turns out, if you hire executives to run your non-profit, they’re just going to use it to further their own objectives. And they don’t care about the mission.
Mozilla is not a non-profit. And if they were, they are legally bound to it. It’s not optional to go by the mission if you’re a non-profit.
Yes, as I said. Mozilla is not a non-profit. Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit. But that was not mentioned. There is a clear distinction.
The Mozilla term is used to be ambiguous, I think deliberately so. So they get ZERO sympathy from critical readers when they do some BS under the auspice of “no, that wasn’t the non-profit side”. You have one reputation, you live and die by your behavior.
The Corporation / Foundation split is great for accounting and corporate structure, sure, but its not a shield against criticism of their behavior not matching their stated missions.
The Mozilla Foundation is a thin wrapper for the Mozilla Corporation, and it’s run by the executives themselves.
Yet another reason to use a hardened fork like Arkenfox or Librewolf; I assume both will disable this by default
Mullvad is also a strong privacy focused fork!
Y’all got choices people, FAFO
I take it that you were referring to Mull (Browser) and not MullVad (VPN service).
Mull is a FF based browser for android. I am talking about Mullvad Browser for the desktop, which is FF and Tor fusion product.
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Not sure what he meant BUT Mullvad does have a lil’ browsy boi.