I’ve seen predictions of Firefox’s downfall for decades. Still waiting for it to happen.
It’s really easy to see the headlines saying things like “Firefox is tracking it’s users and violating their privacy!!!” And panic. But digging into the latest “scandal” (the PPA), it seems like Firefox is behaving pretty reasonably.
One of the main criticisms is that it’s opt-out instead of opt-in. Which… I kind of agree with Mozilla on. 99% of users aren’t going to know or care about this, and the 1% that do are the kind of people who probably would have extensions to disable it or just use some obscure ultra-private browser instead.
I don’t fault NOYB for bringing it up either. It’s good to have organizations like that keeping an eye out for everyone.
But I also get worried that sometimes communies attack their closest allies for being imperfect harder than enemies actively working against their interests.
If they were violating people’s privacy, it would be completely unacceptable to make it opt-out.
But they aren’t. They are doing things that some people believe they’ll want to violate people’s privacy in the future to do in a different way.
I didn’t know what it was, so I looked it up. Their description is here:
https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2024/08/22/ppa-update/
It sounds interesting… It also sounds like it will fail, because Mozilla seems to think that trackers are primarily interested in collecting ad stats, and that targeted advertising is less critical, but I think in reality it’s the other way around, and advertisers won’t accept such a limited solution.