The founder of AdBlock Plus weighs in on PPA:
Privacy on the web is fundamentally broken, for at least 90% of the population. Advertising on the web is fundamentally broken, for at least 90% of the population.
Yet any attempt to improve this situation is met with fierce resistance by the lucky 10% who know how to navigate their way around the falltraps. Because the internet shouldn’t have tracking! The internet shouldn’t have ads! And any step towards a compromise is a capital offense. I mean, if it slightly benefits the advertisers as well, then it must be evil.
It seems that no solution short of eliminating tracking and advertising on the web altogether is going to be accepted. That we live with an ad-supported web and that fact of life cannot be wished away or change overnight – who cares?
And every attempt to improve the status quo even marginally inevitably fails. So the horribly broken state we have today prevails.
This is so frustrating. I’m just happy I no longer have anything to do with that…
The difference to me, between this thing and what Google is building (“Privacy Sandbox”), is that I trust Mozilla to have user interests in mind. They don’t have shareholders, they don’t have a massive foot in the advertising market, so if this thing turns out to be bad for users, then I expect them to fix it or to pull the plug. With Google, I rather expect them to worsen it for users, when they get the chance to do so, without journalists writing about it.
What would it take Mozilla to do, to break your trust?
For example, what if they sold private data? Or, if that is not extreme enough, what if they sold private data to advertising companies? Stuff like geolocation.
Not the person you replied to, but…
To move out of the least-worst option position.
Right now it’s in that position. It’s always been in that position, and IMO it has never not been in that position.
And for the record, I am not talking about Mozilla specifically, but the browser ecosystem for that rendering engine that includes any forks and derivatives… because things like Chrome’s maliciously flawed and user-hostile Manifest v3 also cascade down into forks and alternatives that are based off of it, and so contaminate many other normally-good alternatives.
Does that mean that you trust it, or just that you will continue using it because you need a browser?
Because to me, there’s a big gulf between a company that hasn’t broken your trust and a company that makes the minimum viable product that you need to use daily.
Exactly. If Brave delivered on what I thought they promised (an alternative compensation system for websites), I would’ve switched. I’m totally on-board with paying whatever websites would’ve made through ads to just not see the ads, and I had hoped Brave would’ve made that a thing. If Brave was based on Mozilla tech, I might even be giving them a shot right now.
But they didn’t, so Mozilla remains the least worst.
My priorities are:
I used Opera for years mostly because they were on par w/ 1 and satisfied 2 and 4. Now I’m with Mozilla because they do reasonably well on all four. If Mozilla sells my personal data (violation of 1), I’d switch to something else (probably whatever KDE or GNOME ship with).
I want to agree, but I am reluctant because many platforms want to double dip with ads and subscriptions. Not to even say that everyone wants > $10/mo for everything.
And that’s exactly why I’m dropping Netflix and Disney+. I was fine paying for them when they offered good value, but charging the same amount and adding ads rubbed me the wrong way, especially when the ad-free tier is so much higher that it’s way above the actual revenue they would be making from those ads.
So yeah, the microtransactions to replace ads is predecated on websites not abusing that system. Otherwise I’ll go back to blocking ads.