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Yellow Flag: "Privacy on the web is fundamentally broken, for at least 90% of the population. Advertising on the web is fundamentally broken, for at least 90% of the population…" - Infosec Exchange (infosec.exchange)

submitted 1 year ago by sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al to c/firefox@lemmy.ml

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The founder of AdBlock Plus weighs in on PPA:

Privacy on the web is fundamentally broken, for at least 90% of the population. Advertising on the web is fundamentally broken, for at least 90% of the population.

Yet any attempt to improve this situation is met with fierce resistance by the lucky 10% who know how to navigate their way around the falltraps. Because the internet shouldn’t have tracking! The internet shouldn’t have ads! And any step towards a compromise is a capital offense. I mean, if it slightly benefits the advertisers as well, then it must be evil.

It seems that no solution short of eliminating tracking and advertising on the web altogether is going to be accepted. That we live with an ad-supported web and that fact of life cannot be wished away or change overnight – who cares?

And every attempt to improve the status quo even marginally inevitably fails. So the horribly broken state we have today prevails.

This is so frustrating. I’m just happy I no longer have anything to do with that…

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[–] BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The problem is this was snuck in, there was no transparency.

If it's an improvement for users, wouldn't you be making a big deal of it?

That tells me all I need to know.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They listed it prominently in the official changelog, they've got a support page for it and they have a toggle to disable it. If they wanted to sneak it in, they would not have done any of that.

It's also still unclear, if this will improve the situation for users. If it sees no adoption, it's dead on arrival. If it ends up being abused by advertisers without evidence of it improving privacy, they'll throw it back out.

Like, I agree that a blog post engaging into the discussion would be nice, but I also get that it's not easy to time this correctly. Since Mozilla does develop out in the open, a feature like that could be discovered by journalists as early as the conception phase. Arguably, it still is in the conception phase. People are now stumbling over it, because they made it transparent.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

Exactly. I left it enabled because I don't see an immediate privacy concern, but I will be watching future releases for updates to it. I hope this ends up as Mozilla promises it will, but I can always disable it if it ends up sucking.

I don't trust Mozilla, but I am willing to give them a chance.

[–] Vincent 5 points 1 year ago

So how come you know about this before it's been generally enabled?