204
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024
204 points (97.2% liked)
Firefox
17303 readers
8 users here now
A place to discuss the news and latest developments on the open-source browser Firefox
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
Mozilla: For the foreseeable future, there's a lot of money in advertising, and we want some of it. It's all over the Internet. Why shouldn't some of the profit go to people like us, people who wish things were different even while bravely facing the harsh reality that there is no other choice but to devote ourselves to commercial advertising?
We know that everyone in our community will hate the idea, but surely this too is a sign that we are on the right path. By doing unpopular things, we demonstrate the courage that's needed to save the Internet from the kind of future where Mozilla can't get a piece of the biggest market on the Internet, the only one that matters, the market for advertising.
Sure, you can see it like that.
Doesn't change the reality. Sarcasm doesn't pay bills and personel costs, and hence most websites directly or indirectly rely on advertising. As does most other content like podcasts or videos.
We can either keep being delusional and pretend we can magically revolutionize the whole internet and much of the business around it, or we can be a bit more realistic and try some reforms, like less privacy-intrusive advertising and analysis.
Which do you think has a better chance to actually improve the actual privacy for users? Hrm?
Podcasts, by their very nature, do not use any kind of tracking whatsoever (well, besides IP address regions, anyway).
Absolutely no reason for a browser developer to get in on this besides shameless profiteering.
Maybe I'm cynical but I'm thinking whatever platform the podcast is on probably has that tracking information for sale anyway if the podcast producers want it.
That is probably true for podcasts on exclusive platforms like Spotify, but those are few and far between. Even with those, I don't think Spotify is delivering customized audio files to each user.
It's more like with broadcast TV, where they have general demographic information that they use to attract advertisers.
The general case is a plain ol' RSS feed accessed by any arbitrary client. There's not much data to be tracked there. And there's not a whole lot you can do with an IP address without introducing highly-visible problems. You can infer the general geographic location of your listeners, but that's about it. If you try to do personal tracking via IP address, it's going to be messy. Cell phones don't typically have persistent unique IPs, and even most laptop users are going to be running on a shared external IP (e.g. at a college campus, business, or any ISP that does not provide users with a dedicated IP). And again, they're not customizing audio files per user. It's a mostly static medium.