mcc (@mcc@mastodon.social)
mastodon.social
Attached: 1 image So this, from Firefox, is fucking toxic: https://mstdn.social/@Lokjo/112772496939724214 You might be aware Chrome— a browser made by an ad company— has been trying to claw back the limitations recently placed on ad networks by the death of third-party cookies, and added new features that gather and report data directly to ad networks. You'd know this because Chrome displayed a popup. If you're a Firefox user, what you probably don't know is Firefox added this feature and *has already turned it on without asking you*
  • UnH1ng3d@lemmy.world
    935·
    2 months ago

    I’ve read the “learn more” bit now and I’m going to leave it switched on. (although I use uBlock anyway ‍😅)

    I think this is a legitimate attempt to ‘fix’ the internet. It seems only very basic information on interactions with ads is recorded by the browser, and then it is anonymised. As an example, the advertiser should only receive counts of how many people bought a product after seeing a particular ad. I don’t think they can see what webpage anyone in particular came from, but maybe they can see that: 11% percentage of visitors came from example.com/some-page

    Presumably the anonymised data is only provided once the pool is fairly large and wouldn’t show 100% of visitors came from cornhub when you only had one visitor 🤷‍♂️ Obviously websites will always see an IP address.

    The idea is for this to substitute for traditional, more invasive, tracking. I think it may one day achieve that.

    A warning though: I only just started reading about this.

  • tyler@programming.dev
    806·
    2 months ago

    This happens in every major mastodon thread. Someone claims something without even bothering to research it like the person below did. They make an incredibly big deal about it with tons of claims (which are almost all untrue) and then it gains traction and anyone who doesn’t bother to research now believes something completely untrue.

  • bravemonkey@lemmy.ca
    503·
    2 months ago

    I’m surprised that no one has commented on the Mastodon post’s author recommending people ‘use a privacy concious browser like Chrome’. What a way to invalidate her arguments

    • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
      934·
      2 months ago

      Before that don’t forget to voluntary submit a summary report of your activity to the NSA.

  • JoYo@lemmy.mlEnglish
    18·
    2 months ago

    Must be an account thing because mine is unchecked.

    edit: ah yah, today’s update added it.

    well fuck.

    • ᗪᗩᗰᑎ@lemmy.mlEnglish
      393·
      2 months ago

      If you’ve already read through this and understand what it means and are still worried about your privacy, I would recommend you switch to LibreWolf - it takes all the best practices of hardening Firefox for security and works out of the box. Unfortunately, this means you can’t play certain videos, it doesn’t auto-update, and some - likely many - websites will break/not work. This is the price to pay for true privacy. If you don’t want that, just keep using Firefox.

    • coffinwood@discuss.tchncs.de
      1810·
      2 months ago

      You aren’t happy with your selection of free software and still have the audacity to call the people behind that names? You didn’t even read the article did you.

      Be a “decent” person yourself and start your own browser. We’ll happily judge.