Mozilla’s system only measures the success rate of ads—it doesn’t help companies target those ads—and it’s less susceptible to abuse, EFF’s Lena Cohen told @FastCompany@flipboard.com. “It’s much more privacy-preserving than Google’s version of the same feature.”
https://mastodon.social/@eff/112922761259324925
Privacy experts say the new toggle is mostly harmless, but Firefox users saw it as a betrayal.
“They made this technology for advertisers, specifically,” says Jonah Aragon, founder of the Privacy Guides website. “There’s no direct benefit to the user in creating this. It’s software that only serves a party other than the user.”
Their argument was not that it’s good because people can use Chrome - the remark about Chrome was a sarcastic side note that is not needed to support the argument that it’s not clear what the issue is with an anonymous counter.
My issue was with that type of sarcasm, which is why I responded with a similarly dismissive sarcastic remark.
Dismissing people’s complaints by saying “you can go use something else/move someplace else” is unhelpful and used to negate their complaints without ever having to address their source.
I doubt many people see an anonymous counter as a huge problem itself, I don’t. The point is that this is a first step in a direction we don’t want to see the software go. If you don’t push back against these things from the moment they show up, they will continue to slowly inch in that direction until you end up in a nightmare like Chrome or Edge.
That’s fair enough.