An update on Mozilla’s PPA experiment and how it protects user privacy while testing cutting edge technologies to improve the open web.
The fact that they offered a way to disable this in the main settings is admirable. I understand what they’re trying to do but personally I will immediately disable this.
Although do keep in mind that should this actually become a standard, you could end up in a small minority that way and hence again make yourself able to be traced by being more unique.
Of course, if you run an ad blocker it also just doesn’t matter. You could set the setting to “Blurgenfurl”, doesn’t have any impact.
Can you explain what you mean by an adblocker making this not matter? Wouldn’t that just make you more unique as well? I probably just misunderstood what you said.
Also just by using firefox you’re very unique. Firefox has like 0.1% marketshare lol.
I mean if there’s no ads you can possibly interact with, neither this Firefox system to anonymize ad interactions nor the websites themselves got any interactions to track in any way.
Oh true. But just having an adblocker could make you more finberprintable right? I mean literally any tweak to the browser will add to a fingerprint. But you’re right. It’s all a tradeoff between privacy and fingerprinting.
Fingerprinting is about privacy, and the privacy you gain through blockers far outweighs that lost by fingerprinting. So keep it up :)
That’s my thinking.
Here is how to disable it:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution#w_how-can-i-disable-ppa[your commercially valuable web browsing history is] split into partial, indecipherable pieces and then encrypted. Each piece is addressed to a different entity — one to ISRG and one to Mozilla — so that no single entity is ever in possession of both pieces.
It seems like they’ve explained it more clearly this time, so there is no room for misunderstanding. We just need to trust that Mozilla and ISRG will never collude with each other to combine this data, that they’ll never both be compromised by the same attacker, and that neither of them will ever have security problems that will leak the data in a way that reveals it to the other one. And our incentive to entrust all our web browsing data to this new system is that we should be happy about advertisers being able to precisely measure how well their ads are working, in the hopes that they will then be so benevolent that they decide they no longer want to scrape up all the other data they’re able to collect.
Did I get that right? Because it still sounds crazy.
