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Mozilla to expand focus on advertising - "We know that not everyone in our community will embrace our entrance into this market" (blog.mozilla.org)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

I will go against the tide here and welcome this change. The web is powered by advertising and tracking. It will happen whether Mozilla is part of it or not. In that case, I would much rather have a website using a Mozilla advertising service that is more ethical and respects the user more than the ones from big tech. It's a lesser of two evils and I support this. I would of course rather have no ads at all but we don't live in a fairy tale world and evil companies exist. And like most ads currently in Firefox, I fully trust we will be able to disable them easily, just like we can right now.

I think this is a good thing that Mozilla is finally trying to distance itself from Google's money because it ensures that maintaining the nonprofit is more sustainable

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If Mozilla starts being aggressive to ad blocking, I'll agree with the common opinion on this post. But for now I'm more less neutral. If the choice is Mozilla dies or they do some ad stuff, I'd rather the latter. Whether the current and former people running Mozilla have made the right decisions or not to get to this point is kind of irrelevant, because people do not want Mozilla to disappear (even if they claim otherwise) because Mozilla is still a major driver of privacy-oriented work in w3c and web in general.

Aside from that... The only real way to stop ads and tracking, or at least prevent selling and sharing of data outside of the 1st party collector, is a legal path. Whether Anonym/Mozilla is as private as they are claiming, their intent is at least what a realistic legal solution to web tracking would condone that would continue to allow for revenue via ads. There is no way ads will ever go away in a capitalist economy, so it'll need to do something, blocked or not.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 22 hours ago

Mozilla won’t go after ad blocking. It just makes no sense for them to do so. They haven’t given any indication that they will put extra ads in Firefox, they are saying that they are creating an ad company which respects privacy as an alternative to all the others