124
Mozilla acquired Anonym, an ad start-up
(blog.mozilla.org)
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 23 Jun 2024
124 points (95.6% liked)
Technology
34892 readers
379 users here now
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Advertising isn’t going anywhere, so investing in/supporting ways to more ethically serve ads without harvesting private data seems like a good thing?
Becoming an ad company while trying to put privacy first seems like a conflict of interests in the making
As Jamie Zawinski put it, it’s like a non-profit animal shelter setting up a sideline selling kitten meat to satisfy demands for hockey-stick growth. If somebody castigates them for it, they can point out that the demand for kitten deli slices didn’t going to go away, and if they didn’t sell them, someone else would step in and do it less humanely.
There's actually a real world example of this. Some cats that are disected in schools are euthanized cats from shelters, because the alternative is cat farms that breed cats just to be killed and disected
That's what I always say. Targeted advertising should be illegal. Contextual advertising is acceptable.
If I'm on the star trek wiki, serve me ads for star trek, sci-fi, and whatever. You don't need to know anything about me specifically.
We'd still need to do something about like ads that take up too much space, hurt page performance, or introduce malware, but removing the stalking would be an improvement
Contextual ads can be simple images/html without 20 thousand scripts buried in
Possibly?
Let me rephrase it a little- When you walk past a digital advertising screen at a Westfield Shopping Centre - is it invading your privacy? (The answer is a definite YES, they have facial tracking and keep metrics on where you go in the mall, how long you loiter in certain locations, what stores you go, whether you came back out with bags, etc)
Worse than being a pro-privacy company that utterly depends on Google?
It’s definitely making their job harder on the face of it, but it also differentiates them from other ad companies, so I guess they’re betting on that being a draw for potential clients.