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Bas Schouten: "If you are 'completely anti-ads' (i.e. even if their implementation is private), you probably use an ad blocker. So are unaffected by this." - Mastodon (mastodon.social)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Just wanted to surface this comment, because not enough people are cognizant of the fact that adblockers do their job and prevent any PPA submissions.

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Exactly. This helps the quiet majority, and the people who would turn it off are also those who would block ads anyway. So the majority gets a privacy bump, and those who hate ads get what they've always gotten.

I honestly don't see the issue here.

If Firefox blocked all ads by default, why would a website bother making any accomodations for Firefox? The number of "broken" websites would go up and Firefox users would get even more frustrated. If the quiet majority, who are okay with ads, leave because websites are broken, the rest of us are worse off.

On the flip side, if Firefox is able to broker a deal where privacy is respected so some of the privacy community disable ad-blockers (probably another quiet majority), that's a net win for advertisers because they're getting access to a demographic they otherwise wouldn't. Firefox could take a share of the profits as well, which provides another revenue stream apart from search, meaning Firefox is more independent.

I honestly don't see the issue with PPA. It sounds:

good for users - more privacy
good for advertisers - more people seeing ads
meh for anti-ads people - ad-blockers can still block these ads, or you can disable the feature
good for Firefox - privacy win + more revenue streams

That's exactly the thing Firefox should be doing, finding a way to increase privacy while making itself more independent from Google search revenue.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Does this introduce more revenue streams for Mozilla? This dev said this does not impact their financials in any significant way. Your post is a hypothetical, but this opt-out feature is very real.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

It's not currently rolled out to any advertisers AFAIK, but when it does, I imagine it could become a significant revenue stream. So yes, hypothetical.

I don't think this feature is harmful in any way. If you block ads, it won't impact you. If you don't, you'll either get the current type of ads or the more private ads, so it either does nothing or improves your privacy a bit. It sounds like a win-win to me, which is rare in privacy circles, with the only caveat being a theoretical issue from Mozilla technically having access to your metadata, which they technically already do since you're using their browser.