this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2024
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"Privacy-Preserving" Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us Yet Again (blog.privacyguides.org)
submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

Great article, Makes a lot of the arguments I made against advertiser and mozilla apologists in the previous threads better than I could have.

I think

PPA is an additional privacy attack surface that has no value for end users whatsoever [...]

and

If they truly believed this was the one path away from the constant data theft perpetuated by the advertising industry, they would've announced this loudly and proudly. They could've given the privacy and general Firefox communities ample time to scrutinize the protocol beforehand.

sums it up pretty well.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

scrutinize the protocol beforehand.

Sorry but that buys into the data miners' self serving myths. It implies the protocol is ok unless some failure makes it leak more information than was intended. In fact it's invasive even if it works exactly as hoped. "Tracking" is a misnomer too. It's hostile surveillance even if it's at population level. (Any nonconsensual surveillance that produces info to be used by people you don't like is hostile by definition. And it's near guaranteed that some of the buyers-advertisers, political campaigns and funders, govt agencies, whatever-will be people you don't like). So shut it down.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 months ago

They could've given the privacy and general Firefox communities ample time to scrutinize the protocol beforehand.

Like when they announced they were working on it in 2022: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/privacy-preserving-attribution-for-advertising/