"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
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
Source.
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.
deleted by creator
You are correct. My mistake.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/features/sync/
Oh yeah, agreed, if your syncing then your security model doesn’t include worrying about tracking.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution
https://hackertalks.com/comment/4359282
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.
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/basics/vpn-overview/
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.)
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution
Please explain to me how sending additional data from your private computer to Mozilla servers gives me more privacy and not less.