mcc (@mcc@mastodon.social)
mastodon.social
Attached: 1 image So this, from Firefox, is fucking toxic: https://mstdn.social/@Lokjo/112772496939724214 You might be aware Chrome— a browser made by an ad company— has been trying to claw back the limitations recently placed on ad networks by the death of third-party cookies, and added new features that gather and report data directly to ad networks. You'd know this because Chrome displayed a popup. If you're a Firefox user, what you probably don't know is Firefox added this feature and *has already turned it on without asking you*
  • UnH1ng3d@lemmy.world
    1·
    4 months ago

    I’ve read the “learn more” bit now and I’m going to leave it switched on. (although I use uBlock anyway ‍😅)

    I think this is a legitimate attempt to ‘fix’ the internet. It seems only very basic information on interactions with ads is recorded by the browser, and then it is anonymised. As an example, the advertiser should only receive counts of how many people bought a product after seeing a particular ad. I don’t think they can see what webpage anyone in particular came from, but maybe they can see that: 11% percentage of visitors came from example.com/some-page

    Presumably the anonymised data is only provided once the pool is fairly large and wouldn’t show 100% of visitors came from cornhub when you only had one visitor 🤷‍♂️ Obviously websites will always see an IP address.

    The idea is for this to substitute for traditional, more invasive, tracking. I think it may one day achieve that.

    A warning though: I only just started reading about this.

  • tyler@programming.dev
    1·
    4 months ago

    This happens in every major mastodon thread. Someone claims something without even bothering to research it like the person below did. They make an incredibly big deal about it with tons of claims (which are almost all untrue) and then it gains traction and anyone who doesn’t bother to research now believes something completely untrue.

    • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
      01·
      4 months ago

      Before that don’t forget to voluntary submit a summary report of your activity to the NSA.

    • ᗪᗩᗰᑎ@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      If you’ve already read through this and understand what it means and are still worried about your privacy, I would recommend you switch to LibreWolf - it takes all the best practices of hardening Firefox for security and works out of the box. Unfortunately, this means you can’t play certain videos, it doesn’t auto-update, and some - likely many - websites will break/not work. This is the price to pay for true privacy. If you don’t want that, just keep using Firefox.

  • JoYo@lemmy.ml
    English
    0·
    4 months ago

    Must be an account thing because mine is unchecked.

    edit: ah yah, today’s update added it.

    well fuck.

    • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
      0·
      4 months ago

      Why is Mozilla coming from the position that what advertisers want is reasonable or acceptable in any shape or form? The advertisement industry existed for centuries without the ability to spy on people and they were doing just fine.

      Edit: this being opt-out instead of opt-in also violates the GDPR.

      • Chris@feddit.ukEnglish
        0·
        4 months ago

        How does this violate the GDPR? It increases privacy and stops advertisers tracking everything you do. This seems to be a good thing.

        Advertisers have always been interested in where their ads are seen and whether they convert to purchases. A common example is vouchers, which will tell the advertiser exactly this (10p off, customer redeems, store returns to advertiser, advertiser knows where you got the voucher from/where you saw the advert, where you bought the product - exactly what Firefox is trying to tell them)

      • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
        0·
        4 months ago

        Twitter and Mastodon with their short message chains only amplifies losing context, especially if the original post does not include all necessary information or source links.

        • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          4 months ago

          Yep this.

          It’s gotten to the point where a character limit is itself a seriously toxic part of big-social social media, up there with algorithms and shitty moderation choices. But all of the Twitter people don’t see it.

          Sure there are threads through reply chains. No one reads the chain. The first post is all most will see. Context collapse and superficiality is inevitable with this simple constraint. The fediverse should move on. Sadly, mastodon is the only platform still dedicated to it and they’re 80% of the fediverse.

          If you like short funny quips and shit posts, that’s fine, there’s no character minimum! With long character limits, short quips still abound. Instead, when necessary, you can opt in to longer form text when necessary.