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Nobody likes being tracked by advertisers, and of course nobody likes advertising. It’s invasive, deceptive, and diminishes the user experience in every way imaginable. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that we can all agree to this stance.
Now, where I will disagree with you (and others that feel like you) is that Firefox is not pandering to advertisers. If anything, I feel they are compromising with them, with the user’s best interest at heart. Bear with me for a moment…
There is no arguing that Firefox made a huge misstep in how they’re executing this feature. They should have been talking about it long before the feature was released. That is a huge missed opportunity, and I for one can understand why people would have this knee-jerk “Firefox bad” reaction. It feels shady. It’s a bad look for an otherwise stellar product. Hopefully we can agree here too.
But I believe that if we all take a deep breath, and a step back, for a moment, then we can all see that in the long run this helps the user. No longer will advertisers need to rely on fingerprinting and tracking users. No longer will PII need to be sent to track conversion rates. It’s completely anonymous, and encrypted. And, it’s transparent to the user.
Will it work? Who knows.
But everybody running around screaming about how horrible of an idea this feature is and that everyone needs to disable this feature for no other reason than Firefox made a bad decision to not be more upfront about it, certainly won’t help.
And who would benefit from that? Advertisers.
Advertisers right now thrive on being deceptive, collecting PII, and fingerprinting mine and your behavior. They have invested billions on their infrastructure and networks. If this is successful, it will suck for them. But if it’s successful, it’ll rock for us.
I don't want to compromise with advertisers. I want to block them and not be tracked by them.
So where is my choice as the user of the browser that is running on my machine and using my internet connection and tracking my data?
If you think this will make one iota of difference in advertiser behavior then you must have been born yesterday.
Nothing about this change inhibits your ability to block ads.
That’s the thing: it’s NOT tracking YOUR data. Nothing about this ties data to you. It’s in the name: Privacy-Preserving Advertising.
And yet you’ve forgotten to wish me a happy birthday. How rude! 😤
You can opt out.
You are free as a user to touch grass, and to run an Adblock that enforces your preferences.