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Mozilla Welcomes Anonym: Privacy Preserving Digital Advertising
(blog.mozilla.org)
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this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2024
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While there are a lot of critics of this, ask yourself: for how many services and apps you use (e.g. messenger, cloud storage, email, operating system, web browser…) are you willing to pay recurrently? If that answer is not for every single one of them, then this move is the answer.
The internet desperately needs a way to fund things and advertising seems to be the only viable solution on a bigger scale. And I don’t think that there is anyone better suited than mozilla for the job of pushing a privacy respecting way of doing so. Sure this needs to be done the right way, but they should be given the benefit of the doubt.
And this doesn’t mean that everything needs to be cluttered with ads. You could still pay a bit to remove them.
Even if the answer to the question above was yes, consider the masses. Other people might not care enough/have the same awareness about privacy to pay, but they could gain a lot with this. Consider people in less fortunate circumstances monetary wise. Don’t they deserve privacy if they can’t afford to pay for services?
There are radio stations, financed through ads. And they check if people are listening by calling random persons to ask them what station they are listening to.
So this is a viable business model and nobody is stopping anybody from putting plain pictures and links on sites and just estimate the page visits, but online advertisers want to know more. They always want more.
At the same time, a browser is the essential software to browse the web. So this is as if your TV was like:
Yo, many people mute their TV during commercials and don't pay attention, which kills the poor networks. So I made a deal with advertisers and will check what your doing, while I provide unmutable ads , but don't worry, your privacy is very important to us and we only care about providing to you the best TV experience possible.
So do i understand it correctly, that ads are ok for you, but not targeted ads, because the advertisers always want to know more? Then that seems to be what mozilla is trying to achieve here: to limit what advertisers can know about you.
The technology for targeted ads are already in place, this could be an alternative that preserves more privacy than current ad networks.
It is a bullshit false dichotomy to claim that the only options for business models are charging fees or showing ads. Knock it off with the misinformation.
What are your suggestions besides ads and subscriptions, professor?
Go ask Wikipedia about their business model. Or the Linux kernel. Or any number of other Free Software projects that neither charge users a fee nor show ads.
Those are not businesses. They are free projects which a dedicated person (or group of people) donate their time and energy to produce.
Wikipedia has their semi-annual donation drives and many (not most, but enough worth mentioning) FOSS devs are salaried by companies like Google and Microsoft and are allowed to work on patches to out-of-scope projects on company time provided they're still fulfilling their main roles. There are also Liberapay, Open Collective, Ko-fi and such but for the majority of FOSS devs not funded by large corps, just developing a large and widely-used program because they want to, donations rarely ever cover as much as they would make at a 9-5. There are also nonprofits that distribute donations to FOSS devs. For most it is a money pit, but to them the passion is worth more. They do it for the love, not the money.
These are not businesses.
...and? That's what makes them the best part of the Internet!
And it doesn't stop them from existing, proving that the Internet does not actually have to run on profit.
Yes, we could have an internet without businesses. See here.
Thats why i said “seems“ to be and „on a bigger scale“ to allow for other options. But those other options like through donations(=paying them) are often not enough. Apparently you don’t see opensource developers struggling and choose to just ignore the reality. You also fail to point out other options that scale as well as advertising does. As you seem to have the solution that many people struggle to find, feel free to actually tell us about it. I only expressed my opinion not „misinformation“. Your comment on the other hand failed to provide any arguments to further the discussion. So yeah “knock it off“
Do you have any fucking clue at all just how much money projects like Wikipedia make through donations? Do you realize that Jellyfin has even gone so far as to ask people to stop donating because they have too much money?
Your claim that advertising "scales" and donations don't is a straight-up Iie.
We can cherry-pick projects too.
Lemmy barely gets enough donations to fund a single developer.
core-js, one of the largest JavaScript libraries, was cussed out for even having the audacity to ask for donations.
Donations aren't the steady source of income you seem to be thinking they are.
Again you ignore words like “often”. There certainly are projects that are doing extremely well, and I am happy for them, i am one of those donating.
Yet you ignore the funding problem that exists in open source. You can’t make it go away by naming a few that have done well for themselves. Even those that are doing well enough, what could they achieve, if they had comparable funding to bigger players that are advertising? I am not saying that it’s the option that everybody should go for, but if one chooses to, i would like it to be privacy respecting, and thats where hopefully mozilla will come in. And outside of opensource, on a “normal” persons phone, how many apps are funded via ads? Wouldn’t it be great if those were privacy preserving instead? It’s a step in the right direction.
I will stop replying to you, as you don’t seem mature enough to hold a respectful discussion, without trying to frame my opinions as trying to be manipulative.