Firefox

18040 readers

220 users here now

A place to discuss the news and latest developments on the open-source browser Firefox

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

200

Mozilla explains their recent foray into advertising - A free and open internet shouldn’t come at the expense of privacy (blog.mozilla.org)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

143 comments fedilink hide all child comments

MARK SURMAN, PRESIDENT, MOZILLA Keeping the internet, and the content that makes it a vital and vibrant part of our global society, free and accessible has

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

That is probably true for podcasts on exclusive platforms like Spotify, but those are few and far between. Even with those, I don't think Spotify is delivering customized audio files to each user.

It's more like with broadcast TV, where they have general demographic information that they use to attract advertisers.

The general case is a plain ol' RSS feed accessed by any arbitrary client. There's not much data to be tracked there. And there's not a whole lot you can do with an IP address without introducing highly-visible problems. You can infer the general geographic location of your listeners, but that's about it. If you try to do personal tracking via IP address, it's going to be messy. Cell phones don't typically have persistent unique IPs, and even most laptop users are going to be running on a shared external IP (e.g. at a college campus, business, or any ISP that does not provide users with a dedicated IP). And again, they're not customizing audio files per user. It's a mostly static medium.