Notes in Google Keep will sync between mobile and web

Ads should be tailored to the content of the website they are on. Not to me in any way whatsoever.

Then you might be interested in this new technology being tested by Mozilla that aims to replace tracking cookies.

Mozilla isn’t doing anything to Firefox. The Anonym purchase you linked to was literally to acquire a technology they developed which would, if implemented web-wide, end the dystopian nightmare of privacy invasion that is the current paradigm where a few dozen large companies track everything everyone does on the internet all the time. “Privacy preserving” isn’t just a buzzword in that article - privacy is actually preserved, and the companies involved (including Mozilla) learn nothing at all about you - not your name, not an “anonymous” identifier, not your behavior, nothing. Moreso, Anonym didn’t just create this technology, the entire company was purpose-founded to create this technology.

There’s a lot of misinformation floating around about Mozilla in particular at the moment. Very little of the animosity they receive is truly deserved once you dig past the narrative and find out what Mozilla’s actually up to, and why.

Thatâ™s⠀rea​lly cool. � Ꭰо уо𝗎 𝗍һі𝗇𝗄 уо𝗎’ӏӏ со𝗇𝗍і𝗇𝗎е ᖯ𝗋о𝗐ѕі𝗇𝗀 ӏі𝗄е 𝗍һа𝗍?

By default they do block quite a bit. The “Standard” tracking protection option in their Settings page says it blocks Social media trackers, Cross-site cookies in all windows, tracking content in private windows, cryptominers, and fingerprinters. They have a strict option with a disclaimer that it may break some sites or content that does a bit more.

So they’re already blocking as much as they reasonably can without affecting legitimate functionality, and they have an option to block even more.

As for “Why offer them anything?”, my guess is pragmatism. They’re a lot more likely to succeed if they propose a system where the users give up nothing but companies can thrive anyways, vs. a system where the users give up nothing and the companies in charge of everything just burn to the ground and die.

I notably don’t have a strong opinion on whether or not I think they’ll succeed with this feature. I think their intentions are pure, though, and that it legitimately offers no privacy risk to users at all. I think the best chance it has is something like government mandates. Maybe there’s also a future where they somehow get Google on board for PR reasons or something. I wish them the best of luck.

I look at it as a pragmatic attempt to work within the system we have to shift the internet away from its current nightmare dystopia of user tracking and information selling, and toward a system where all parties can be reasonably happy, with companies being able to receive aggregate anonymous data that helps them operate efficiently, without compromising even a tiny bit on user privacy.

Editing to actually respond to your question about who Firefox is built for: Definitely the user. But users don’t exist in a vacuum. Mozilla can and does consider the entire ecosystem their products and users exist within, and can take steps to make that ecosystem, the internet, a better place for users. The best part is that their actions often make the internet better for everyone - not just Firefox users.

Nothing here is incompatible with the principles of free software. The feature isn’t for the “sole benefit” of advertisers - it’s beneficial to users specifically because it attempts to shift the paradigm from one where they have essentially no privacy regarding their online activities whatsoever, to one where they give up literally nothing about their privacy.

And they are not selling data - I believe that to be a straight-up lie. I’ve searched extensively to find out if anything is being sold here. I have no doubt at all that if they were, the headlines would be about Mozilla selling user data, rather than about tracking users.

From their FAQ:

The system is designed so that neither the advertisers, nor the websites with the ads, nor Mozilla can ever tell which specific users had their activity contribute to the data being reported.

The current paradigm is that the vast majority of internet users have their activity tracked across a vast majority of websites. It’s that dozens of large companies have access to information about which websites you’ve been to, when you visited them, and what you did there. That they can and do sell this information to other companies, who usually have as their primary goal using that data to somehow extract money from you to them. Users who block tracking like this are a tiny minority.

The new paradigm would be that the companies in question know none of that, and instead get told information like “approximately 7 out of 487 people who saw your advertisement on [x] went on to purchase your product on [y]”.

I would call that pretty paradigm-shifting. The only absurd thing here is that this is somehow being used, loudly and repeatedly, to make it seem like FIrefox is somehow worse for user privacy than its competition.

People feel betrayed because that’s the narrative they’re being fed - the number of times this same exact story has been posted in the past few days is staggering, as is the number of anti-Firefox stories that have been posted in general over the past few weeks/months. But almost every time one of these anti-Firefox stories comes out, just a small amount of digging shows it’s a whole lot of narrative or even outright misinformation piled on top of nothing at all.

The truth is Mozilla did nothing here that harms or has the potential to harm its users or their privacy, and in fact they’re actively trying to build a system that, if successful, would be a paradigm-shifting boost to online privacy. Mozilla is a legitimately good tech company that has made and continues to make the internet a better place, which makes the recent coordinated push to demonize them as an enshittified boogeyman all the more bizarre, especially considering who their competitors are.

Cross-posting my comment from the post you cross-posted (and possibly created your account just to post?)

After reading about the actual feature (more), this seems like an absolutely gigantic non-issue. Like most anti-Mozilla stories end up being.

The whole thing is an experimental feature intended to replace the current privacy nightmare that is cross-site tracking cookies. As-implemented it’s a way for advertisers to figure out things like “How many people who went to our site and purchased this product saw this ad we placed on another site?”, but done in such a way that neither the website with the ad, nor the website with the product, nor Mozilla itself knows what any one specific user was doing.

The only thing I looked for but could not find an answer on one way or the other is if Mozilla is making any sort of profit from this system. I would guess no but actually have no idea.

There are definitely things that can be said about this feature, like that users with pre-existing installs should have been asked to have it turned on (for optics alone, apparently), or that its mission of replacing tracking cookies is unlikely to succeed. But the feature itself has virtually no privacy consequences whatsoever for anybody.

I’m absolutely convinced there’s a coordinated anti-Firefox astroturfing campaign going on lately.

For those wanting to follow along

Don’t bother. They’re a conservative arguing in bad faith. Their comment history (especially comments like this) makes that abundantly clear.

Finally, a use for NFTs

Edit: Wait, nevermind, they said no throwing it away

Are you thinking of Snowden?

This stance has nothing to do with anglocentrism and everything to do with making Lemmy usable. You set your languages in your profile so you’ll only see posts and comments in those languages. No one likes seeing lots of posts in languages they don’t understand, and that that only happens when people are too lazy to set the language indicator. I’d fully expect and encourage non-English speakers to downvote improperly tagged English posts in their feed as well.

I downvote non-English results I see on my All page as a punishment for not correctly setting the language on the post, which takes 1 second to do and would ensure it doesn’t spam the feed for non-speakers. I can’t imagine I’m alone - was the post in question not correctly tagged as Polish content, like your post is correctly tagged as English content?

If it was correctly tagged, then those downvotes were all from people who speak Polish.

If you remove “Undetermined” as a language on your profile, then all the unlabeled foreign language content should stop showing up for you. The problem is that all the unlabeled English content would also stop showing up for you, then. That’s why having “Undetermined” be the default option is not good - it only makes the problem worse.

One that’s gotten me a few times is if you’re typing a reply to someone, either in the comments or a PM, then mid-typing you upvote (or downvote) them (or anyone else), it deletes your comment-in-progress. I’ve lost a few comments that way, one of which took about 20 minutes to write which I just gave up on and didn’t post afterward.

I also really don’t like that the default language option is “Undetermined”. It makes not labeling the correct language the default behavior, which makes a lot of foreign language material show up in my feed. Your own post and 2 of the 4 comments at the time of me posting are unlabeled.

I mean, this lemmy post would be exhibit #1 - but even without it it is not at all difficult to establish intent to deceive from just the actions OP is suggesting and nothing more. Sometimes intent is the easy part.

That’s not even always the issue though - like recently Veritasium had an ancient video demonitized for mentioning that the subject of the video committed suicide, so now their most recent video is a censored re-upload of it. They include a new segment talking about the frustrating demonitization scheme Youtube has.