Original toot:
It has come to my attention that many of the people complaining about #Firefox’s #PPA experiment don’t actually understand what PPA is, what it does, and what Firefox is trying to accomplish with it, so an explainer 🧵 is in order.
Targeted advertising sucks. It is invasive and privacy-violating, it enables populations to be manipulated by bad actors in democracy-endangering ways, and it doesn’t actually sell products.
Nevertheless, commercial advertisers are addicted to the data they get from targeted advertising. They aren’t going to stop using it until someone convinces them there’s something else that will work better.
“Contextual advertising works better.” Yes, it does! But, again, advertisers are addicted to the data, and contextual advertising provides much less data, so they don’t trust it.
What PPA says is, “Suppose we give you anonymized, aggregated data about which of your ads on which sites resulted in sales or other significant commitments from users?” The data that the browser collects under PPA are sent to a third-party (in Firefox’s case, the third party is the same organization that runs Let’s Encrypt; does anybody think they’re not trustworthy?) and aggregated and anonymized there. Noise is introduced into the data to prevent de-anonymization.
This allows advertisers to “target” which sites they put their ads on. It doesn’t allow them to target individuals. In Days Of Yore, advertisers would do things like ask people to bring newspapers ads into the store or mention a certain phrase to get deals. These were for collecting conversion statistics on paper ads. Ditto for coupons. PPA is a way to do this online.
Is there a potential for abuse? Sure, which is why the data need to be aggregated and anonymized by a trusted third party. If at some point they discover they’re doing insufficient aggregation or anonymization, then they can fix that all in one place. And if the work they’re doing is transparent, as compared to the entirely opaque adtech industry, the entire internet can weigh in on any bugs in their algorithms.
Is this a utopia? No. Would it be better than what we have now? Indisputably. Is there a clear path right now to anything better? Not that I can see. We can keep fighting for something better while still accepting this as an improvement over what we have now.
Me wondering why the Firefox package archive is suddenly controversial…
does anybody think they’re not trustworthy?
I didn’t until I read that sentence. I actually get what they are trying to do here, but good grief…
Man alive, I thought that Mozilla had been doing their own Personal Package Archives so that we didn’t have to deal with Ubuntu packaging it as a Snap anymore. And this is doubly disappointing.
Mozilla: We want to offer anonymised data so advertiser stop trying to track you with shady means. You can opt ou tho.
Privacy ultras: WHY YOU WANT DATA?!
Mozilla: …
Money is the answer
Why is Firefox getting involved in ads? 💵? To reduce their dependence on Google’s payment for keeping Google as the default search engine?
“You have become the very thing you swore to destroy”
They keep saying many words waving hands frantically and people still don’t like it. I bet if they explain 10th time with colourful diagrams and 3 minute whiteboard explainer video people still won’t like it. Such an ungrateful crowd
You need hands on workshops, we will organise them with foundation budget. That will surely explain things sufficiently. We will also give out informational flyers in small communities to foster local enlightenment.
They are definitely in a weird position. On one hand, the current state of internet advertising is horrifying. This has nothing to do with anything Firefox has done. On the other hand, trying to explain to privacy absolutists why these innovations in targeted advertising is actually a revolutionary leap in user privacy, is obviously never going to take.
And what is the advertising industry doing to earn back the trust that they’ve eroded with their incessant, relentless abuse over the entire life of the Internet?
Creating ads that are even more targeted to you so you can forget about everything and buy that electric kitchen knife you just saw scrolling reddit
I don’t know, I am on the fence about the XYT FULLFORGE lithium powered, rechargable electronic kitchen knife I saw on reddit. I just don’t know if I can trust the comments which say it stays sharp forever, and I am very skeptical that it truly has the fastest cutting speed of any knife on the market. Perhaps I will go read the Amazon reviews again to get more information about the patented digital motor design.
