"No shady privacy policies or back doors for advertisers" proclaims the Firefox homepage, but that's no longer true in Firefox 128.
Less than a month after acquiring the AdTech company Anonym, Mozilla has added special software co-authored by Meta and built for the advertising industry directly to the latest release
It’s someone not willing to make any modest concessions in order to make the vast array of free content available viable to create. Modest concessions like your browser saying “here’s a small subset of topics the person might be interested in”. You’ve got to be pretty extremist to suggest that that’s privacy-invading.
If the concession removes somebody’s privacy, it is a privacy invalidating concession. Your definition not mine
Software running on my computer, should be my agent, representing my interests, and if I just want to display data transmitted over the network, and not send any data back, that should be within my explicit control. Not even talking about privacy, talking about agency.
If open source software, written by a non-profit, wants to violate my agency with opt outs rather than explicit consensual opt-ins. At the very least it’s not respecting my privacy, and at worst it’s trying to lie to me, remove my agency from my own devices.
You can say there’s a social contract, that people online have to feed the advertising machines, and I’m happy to debate you about that. There is utility there for sure, but saying you’re an extremist if you don’t want to participate is also an extreme position. And I don’t think it’s reasonable
Topics is in your control. It’s all in your control. You can turn off specific topics you don’t want, or disable it entirely if you really want to. Browsers choosing not to implement it has nothing to do with agency, and appeals to that notion merely belie either ignorance or bad faith.
You are poorly mannered debate partner. You have just said I am either ignorant or arguing in bad faith. You have denied me agency of my own opinions.
I will no longer converse with you
Not ignorant in general, and I’m sorry if it came across that way.
But ignorant about how Topics works, yes. To assert that Topics takes away agency can only be bad faith or ignorance.
Then why did Mozilla deploy this silently, with it enabled silently?
If it’s so good for end users, wouldn’t they shout it from the rooftops?
Further, Google, et al, created the battlefield by 2000, and now you’re sitting here blaming users for being suspicious of people who’ve repeatedly, over TWO DECADES, made it clear they have, at best, an antagonistic attitude towards web users.
At this point, no, fuck them. I will block everything, at every turn. Just the same as I’ll never let the guy who stole half my CD collection back into my house.