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Firefox CTO Responds On Collecting User Advertisement Data
(libreddit.bus-hit.me)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This is my takeaway in general. The idea of this sounds fine, but the fact that they opted everyone into this experiment is really stupid considering a huge chunk of people use Firefox are privacy-conscious and care deeply about this stuff.
Well you close and lock the door. So you kind of do opt-in. It's just muscle memory at that point.
Isn't privacy invasion (ie, cookies) already ON by default? What's the difference?
Not all cookies are harmful and some websites don't work properly without cookies. Having cookies off by default also usually means user preferences wouldn't be saved when you leave and return to a website.
Cookies have non-infringing uses, like identifying you to Lemmy's Web interface so that you can post from your account with the settings you've chosen for it. Problem is, even sites where they have a proper purpose don't set them at the appropriate time (as part of the login process, or when you first add something to your shopping cart for ecommerce sites).
Ad tracking has absolutely no uses that benefit the user, unless they're the type of weirdo who actually clicks on ads voluntarily, which I'd guess is less than 1% of the population. Those people can use the opt-in toggle if they want.
Honestly?
Yes, it is shitty. But if you at all care about privacy you should be monitoring your software anyway. You never know when a previously "good" companies will do something you disagree with
That's only the case because privacy isn't the default, and it should be. Privacy is something that's been taken from us. I think people that don't want to learn or care much about privacy are still entitled to it.
Pretty much, if you're security conscious you'll go and turn it off, if it keeps meta from lobbying against the mozzila foundation it seems like a happy middle ground.
If/when they make it so you can't turn it off anymore that will be a different story