A screenshot from the Firefox "Privacy & Security" settings page showing "Website Advertising Preferences" with a checked-by-default option to "Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement". The description beneath reads "This helps sites understand how their ads perform without collecting data about you" with a link to "Learn More" that I copied into the text of the toot.

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1. Jeff Martin (cuchaz@gladtech.social)'s status on Saturday, 13-Jul-2024 19:56:34 JST Jeff Martin

   Yup, it's true. Firefox 128 includes new adtech features that are turned on by default and announced with very little fanfare, so most people might not even know they're there. :blobcatverysad:

   Well, this is me telling you they're there. You might want to go ahead and take a minute to opt out.

   Here's the little helpful explainer from Mozilla about how it all works:

   https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution

   My read seems to be: Mozilla says website surveillance is generally bad and should be defended against. Cool. No notes. Firefox actually has a lot of nice anti-tracking and privacy features there and that's the main reason why I like Firefox.

   But, and I swear I'm not even joking a little bit here, Mozilla goes on to say that advertisers might be happier if Firefox itself just tracked you directly and sent activity reports back to them.

   Doesn't that sound great?

   Now, to Mozilla's credit, they claim to anonymize the activity reports. And you can still meaningfully opt out of the whole system.

   But WTF, mate?! I use Firefox *because* it fights against adtech. Or at least it used to. Now, Mozilla just lets adtech right in the front door and hopes you won't notice? :blobcat_thisisfine:

   Well, we noticed. Mozilla is damage and we need to route around it.

   UPDATE: The about:config setting for this is `dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled`. It's a bool. Set it to false to turn it off.