Firefox added ad tracking and has already turned it on without asking you - eviltoast
  • best_username_ever@sh.itjust.works
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    4 months ago

    You described ad tracking. Also why is an open source browser wasting time and money to create such a feature that no user needs?

    • ArbiterXero@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Its impression tracking, not user tracking and its forced anonymous by design. There’s a few gigantic differences.

      And they’re doing it to try and find a better way for advertisers to get some information without having to track everything you do (what happens now)

        • ArbiterXero@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          As a user, if this replaces active tracking of your browsing, is that better for you?

          Do you need your privacy from web tracking?

          Or do you currently love having Google track everything you do?

            • ArbiterXero@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              The world where I read the release notes.

              Ask yourself the same question?

              How is tracking better than a counter?

              Currently they’re tracking everything you do. Mozilla thinks they should only get a counter.

              Which of those is better?

    • BakedCatboy@lemmy.ml
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      4 months ago

      Not when the conversation tracking is done 100% locally. The only thing sent from the browser is telling a server to increment a counter - a single bit of data. It’s hardly any different than a visitor counter that “tracks” how many visitors a site got, which I think would really be a stretch if you claimed that visitor counters were tracking individual users.

      I’m not sure if you actually read the details, but this system enables sites to tell your browser which ad IDs are related to an action you’re doing (for example on a check out page the site will give your browser a list of ad IDs for the shop) so that conversion tracking can be done locally in your browser. Then, without needing to share any personal information, your browser can tell an aggregator which (if any) of the ads you have previously seen, and that counter gets incremented.

      It’s literally just a view counter for ads that only increments when the ad is successful, and because the correlation between the ad view and the checkout is done locally, the advertiser doesn’t need to link your ad view with your checkout action - your browser did that correlation privately and locally.

      Sure no user needs this, but advertisers do everything in their power to track ad conversions and this gives them a mechanism to do that without giving them any information besides “this ad achieved it’s goal 30 times”, which is so much better than adtech tracking every page we visit so that they can have the information to deduce that for themselves.

    • lmaydev@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Ad tracking by the user Vs user tracking by ads. It’s very different.

        • lmaydev@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Submitting anonymous data is better than ads tracking incredibly personal data essentially.

            • lmaydev@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              Look no one likes ads but at the same time most people don’t want to pay to use websites.

              Advertising is just the reality of the internet.

              So given the choice between anonymous data I control Vs them sucking up all the personal info they can I know what I’d choose.