About the ads thing in 128 - Lemmy.zipRepost from r/firefox: Right. I’m getting tired of seeing people dump on Firefox
and Mozilla about this thing in the release notes: Firefox now supports the
experimental Privacy Preserving Attribution API, which provides an alternative
to user tracking for ad attribution. This experiment is only enabled via origin
trial and can be disabled in the new Website Advertising Preferences section in
the Privacy and Security settings. What is this? And why is it not something to
get heated about? Attribution is how advertisers know how to pay the right site
owner when someone clicks on their ad. It’s important for ad-supported sites
that clicks get attributed. Right now, attribution is basically incompatible
with protecting privacy. Advertisers use every method of tracking you can name,
and some you can’t, to provide accurate attribution. The Privacy Preserving
Attribution API is an experimental way of informing an advertiser that someone
clicked on an ad on a given site without leaking that it was you, specifically,
who did that. Specifically, ads using the API ask Firefox to remember that they
were seen, on what sites, and to what sites they lead. Then, when the user
visits the destination site, the destination site asks Firefox to generate a
report and submit it via a separate service that mixes your report with reports
from other people and forwards these aggregated reports in large batches. Any
traces that might be unique to you are lost in the crowd. This is still
experimental, being enabled by Mozilla on a site-by-site basis as developers
request it. It’s not a free-for-all yet, and I can only find one entry on
Bugzilla of a site who’s requested it.
lemmy.zip
From my understanding this is only a value add in terms of privacy? It’s basically just asking every site to use this more private form of attribution, so I don’t believe there’s any more personal data being collected, it’s just trying to send it in a more anonymized way if a given site supports it.