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EFF Says Mozilla's PPA is better than Google's Solution (www.fastcompany.com)

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

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Mozilla’s system only measures the success rate of ads—it doesn’t help companies target those ads—and it’s less susceptible to abuse, EFF’s Lena Cohen told @[email protected]. “It’s much more privacy-preserving than Google’s version of the same feature.”

https://mastodon.social/@eff/112922761259324925

Privacy experts say the new toggle is mostly harmless, but Firefox users saw it as a betrayal.

“They made this technology for advertisers, specifically,” says Jonah Aragon, founder of the Privacy Guides website. “There’s no direct benefit to the user in creating this. It’s software that only serves a party other than the user.”

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

As a privacy enthusiast and pragmatist, I see Firefox as providing no additional benefit to users or advertisers. Considering the laughably small market share of Firefox, I'm not sure how it is expected to woo advertisers over either.

Which of these options look more robust: Google Topics, Mozilla PPA, or advertisers doing AB testing on their own by simply using different links for different audiences?

Method:	PPA	Topics	Using different links
Corporate creator	Facebook	Google	-
Needs users to trust 3rd party?	Yes (Mozilla)	Yes (Google)	No
~% browsers it works on	<3%	>60%	100%
Guaranteed privacy increase?	No	No	No

If you trust the advertiser, they can do it on their own. If you don't trust the advertiser, then the additional third party does nothing.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

This is a nonsense comparison as these features serve completely different purposes, while only having in common that advertisers currently use user tracking to achieve the same.

Topics data-mines your browsing history for information about your interests and reveals this information to advertisers in order to improve ad selection. It's meant to replace ad networks tracking each individual user's visits to connected websites and building that profile themselves. Since this is, in a way, much more powerful than tracking cookies, Chrome has a scary dialog asking for it to be enabled, and I don't think we'll be seeing it in Firefox. "Using different links" cannot replace user profiling at all.

PPA doesn't provide any new capabilities to advertisers. It's a privacy-preserving way of measuring ad campaign success that is currently done by ad networks tracking individual users from ad impressions to conversions. "Using different links" is also defective, as advertisers need to connect ad impressions to conversions even if they are not immediately connected through a click on the ad.

If these features become generally available, this reduces the leverage advertisers have on legislators to prevent tracking from being outlawed. Mozilla will be hoping Chrome picks up PPA.

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

You want to legislate telling companies which servers they are allowed to gather data from, making it into a de jure oligopoly rather than a de facto one?!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Where did I say that?