The docs and communications around mozilla pivot to advertising is both a stunning display of an insular echo chamber culture that has completely lost the plot and seems to have no critical internal voices, and also a fascinating attempt at corporate gaslighting, claiming that advertising makes things accessible and so they are enabling the advertising and surveillance economy "for the poor."
It's amazing how often the foregrounded or backgrounded assumption of "only rich people care about privacy" makes an appearance.
Look at the costs and benefits described here: https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experiment#end-user-benefit
Costs: people lose their privacy
Benefits: data is valuable to advertisers
Therefore the benefits outweigh the costs.
Like if you do cost benefit analysis that way then you get to do anything
Me stealing your lunch
Costs: you dont have a sandwich
Benefits: I have a sandwich and dont have to pay for it
Like yes, people need to get paid for stuff. I thought their prior work on micropayments was a good idea - it would be great to be able to throw 50 cents at a news org to read an article instead of bouncing off a $7.99 monthly subscription paywall. Thats a consent driven strategy that doesnt involve harvesting attention.
But this messaging re: advertising is doing the thing like "if you hate capitalism so much why havent you come up with a fully realized alternative on the verge of implementation" ignoring the vested and entrenched interests that have spent decades structuring the web to make it appear inevitable.
The internal narrative of "advertising makes the web accessible and we know we're doing the right thing exactly because we're getting pushback from everyone" is... something.
In general when a story makes no sense its because someone is withholding some key details. The idea that advertisers will voluntarily walk away from invasive ad tech to get worse data at a higher price because it's the right thing to do makes absolutely zero sense. Mozilla positioning itself as an advertiser that can sell unique browser-level data streams with plausible privacy deniability makes a lot more sense.
@jonny often enough when a story makes no sense is because you don't understand what's going on here, it's because you are putting it in the wrong context and just personally missing the bus.
No, losing privacy and stealing a sandwich are not the same thing. It's weird that you think they are.
This is apples and oranges. They are not a comparable thing. Letting knowledge go to more people is not the same as losing the ability to eat a sandwich.
This seems to make no sense to you because you just don't understand what you're talking about here, you are framing it incorrectly, you don't understand the mechanics of the situation.
So you just come across as sounding kind of ignorant, naive. Your argument doesn't really make sense.
