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Ads Based On Browsing History Are Coming To All Firefox Users
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla has announced plans to launch a feature called "Suggested Tiles," which will provide sponsored recommendations to visit certain websites when other websites show up in the user's new tab page. The tiles will begin to show up for beta channel users next week, and the company is asking for feedback. For testing purposes, users will only see Suggested Tiles "promoting Firefox for Android, Firefox Marketplace, and other Mozilla causes." It's not yet known what websites will show up on the tiles when the feature launches later this summer. The company says, "With Suggested Tiles, we want to show the world that it is possible to do relevant advertising and content recommendations while still respecting users’ privacy and giving them control over their data."
Why? Why do you rape us with this kind of shit? Is fucking with the UI (making the goddamn options menu a ugly mess of a webpage) and adding DRM codecs not enough?
Jesus christ on a stick. You can't find a way to suicide your market share faster.
* Note: if you set DNT=1, it is possible that you may not be receiving Suggested Tiles. You can very simply enable them on the new tab page with the cogwheel. We made the decision to opt users out of all sponsored Tiles experiences if they have DNT=1 quite early on, as we believe that most DNT early adopters are seeking to opt out of all advertising experiences. However, it’s important to understand that no tracking is involved in delivering Tiles.
As a Firefox Nightly user, I've already had to deal with the spam tiles. The fix is to install a 3rd party speed dial.
I use Super Start. It's nothing fancy, but it's clean and gets the job done.
How about you better give a mechanism to disable this crap?
Click on the "gear" icon (top right of the new tab page)
Clear the "Include suggested sites" box
..because chrome doesn't collect browsing data for ad delivery? lol
I guess the lesson we're leaning is: keeping quiet about behavior is indeed better than being open.
Well, if they choose to make it opt-in, then awesome, no harm no foul, and only people who turn it on will have it.
But when it is made opt-out, it says "fuck you, we'll track you unless you know enough to stop us".
And it's that kind of behavior which really pisses us off. It shouldn't be up to the average user to have to know where to disable this crap.
Just like they backed down on 3rd party cookies to keep the ad companies happy -- it's a sign that increasingly they're driven by money, instead of writing a good browser which doesn't have all of this shit in it.
If they make this crap opt in, nobody will bitch at them. But they haven't. And we're pissed off.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
a little harsh when all you need to do is change preference in about:config:
browser.newtab.url to about:blank
done and done. the whole 'smart' newtab page is gone for good. that is one of the very nice things about firefox....... configurability..
No vertical tabs 10 years after widescreen displays started spreading widely?
Tree Style Tabs
Corporate Gadfly
Jonathan Archer: the most beaten up Enterprise captain in Star Trek history
http://www.seamonkey-project.org/
All the web-rendering goodness of FireFox. Stable user interface. No suggested tiles. Available for Windows/Mac/Linux.
All the people complaining are missing the point: Adverstising is inevitable, and today advertising comes with massive privacy violations (especially tracking). Mozilla is developing a way to enable advertising without the privacy violations. If they succeed, imagine the dramatic increase in your privacy if vendors can deliver ads without tracking.
From TFA:
Mozilla is making a bold promise. âoeWith Suggested Tiles, we want to show the world that it is possible to do relevant advertising and content recommendations while still respecting usersâ(TM) privacy and giving them control over their data.â
And this is not just superficial security; they have really thought it through. For one thing, your browser history and the analytics that determine what ads to display stay on your computer. For more examples:
Because delivering such content to Firefox users can result in privacy issues, Mozilla has taken three steps to limit what information it collects:
1. A system of rules in place to limit what Mozilla or its partners can infer about users based on Tiles data. Each interest category must have a minimum of 5 URLs. Interest categories are constructed such that no single URL is significantly more likely to appear in a userâ(TM)s browsing history than any other URL in the category. Suggested Tiles also cannot be triggered based on combinations of URLs in the interest category.
2. While Tiles partners can suggest URLs to include, the companyâ(TM)s Content Services team actually defines the interest categories. A separate role on the team, which isnâ(TM)t involved in creating the interest categories, approves the final categories. Furthermore, interest categories are publicly available, stating the label of the bucket and the collection of URLs specified against it. The current interest categories are available in the source code here.
3. IP addresses are discarded within 7 days of collection and no other unique IDs associated with Tiles are collected. Only one Suggested Tile is included per new tab page, which prevents impression data from providing a more complete portrait of the userâ(TM)s history. Reports containing aggregate impression and click data (number of impressions, clicks, and so on) are only shared with partners. No individual data is provided to advertising clients.
For more, see these lnks:
https://blog.mozilla.org/priva...
https://blog.mozilla.org/advan...
Also on the top right of a new tab is a settings 'cog' where you can choose "Enhanced", "Classic" or "Blank" so you can easily turn this off.
The details are fairly straightforward and are laid out on this page.
Some choice exerpts to soothe the paniced minds:
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce