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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."
good bye Firefox. last nail in the coffin. I wanted to like it. I did. I still dislike Chrome's UI and the fact Google owns it.
Crap maybe I'll switch to Opera it's actually really really nice now as a UI.
https://developer.mozilla.org/...
Build Instructions
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
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.
How about no? How about some of us don't want advertising? How about you better give a mechanism to disable this crap?
What part of "not interested in your damned ads" is hard to understand?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Remember when the Netscape web browser cost $40? Remember buying one? Me neither.
Looks like it's time to start uninstalling Firefox across all computers...
And that might be the push needed for me to try out IceCat (formerly IceWeasel) https://www.gnu.org/software/g...
How is taking our browser history to serve ads respecting our privacy?
A search suggests they made $311 million in 2012, how much money is actually required to run Mozilla?
* 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.
So this "feature" can be disabled by the user?
Or should we just disable auto-update and stick with version 38.0.1
How can they be respecting my privacy seeing that such a feature would require that they have access to my browsing history. Even if (in theory) they aren't downloading my browsing history and it is my browser making the requests they can deduce what sites I must be browsing to request such "suggestions."
So if I mostly go to sites that involve sex with bowls of pasta and my browser were to request suggestions involving bowls of pasta porn it isn't much of stretch for them to guess what kind of sites I go to.
This shit pisses me off. I already use a VPN to keep my ISP from this sort of interference. Now it is my damn browser ratting on me.
How about a big fat no. Firefox already has a dropping market share and now it will drop by at least one more(me).
Just to be clear as to how much I value my privacy and don't want tracking. I use a VM for all services that I log into that goes through a separate VPN. Thus my day to day surfing is 100% separate from anything that has any logins. So any cookies/IP address that facebook, google, etc might have handed to me aren't available during my general web surfing.
I break zero laws yet I still want nobody tracking me as is my right.
Is this referring to the new thing, or the thing they did with tiles a while ago? I have DNT set and saw the previous sponsored tile crap.
It's nice that there is an option to disable it - even if it is indirect. But the fact that the "feature" is there at all still offends me. When the makers of a browser decide it's a good idea to turn my browsing history into targeted advertising, I decide a different browser is a good idea.
I've been making less use of Firefox in general in recent years anyway, but this is the straw that broke the camel's back. Firefox gets uninstalled on all my machines.
Use the Firefox plug-ins Ghostery, Privacy Badger, Self-destructing Cookies, and Better Privacy and everything will be pretty much wiped out.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
I read "targeted ads". But are those new ads, or it replace the old ones?
Elok
I delete all history and cookies and cache each time I log out. Although I like the technical aspect of tracing me and showing advertisement, as a consumer and user I detest it.
I detest it more than I like it. Or like Banksy says:
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply youâ(TM)re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. Itâ(TM)s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially donâ(TM)t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, donâ(TM)t even start asking for theirs.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
On me, at least, it has the effect of making me less inclined to buy the advertised product.
No - ALL advertising is bad period.
"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."
First the advertisements will be optional. Then they won't be.
.
How long before the few remaining Firefox users realize that Mozilla is behaving like any other money-grabbing corporation?
Mozilla 1998: we want the internet to remain a free and open forum and in this spirit align our software to freedom and the user. the users choice and voice will be come top priority in our products, and we will write the mozilla 10 point manifesto to ensure we always take this into account.
Mozilla 2015: We want the internet to make payments on our car loans and help achieve the goal of replacing all 4 tires on the bentley twice a year. We believe, legitimately believe, that users want tiles to show them advertisements. we think they like having a video chat app in their browser and we want to make sure corporations understand what is possible when targeted advertising and a morally bankrupt moneytrain brand come together to abuse their users trust and appreciation. We are completely deaf to the fact that adblock and noscript exist and are extremely popular plugins for our hobbled shitwreck advertising platform masquerading as a browser. Hail satan.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Works just fine on this version too. 35.0
I have to say however, I am not upgrading further, because of resource problems I have had. The newer version for some reason sometimes starts to use 1 cores maximum CPU usage, eventually hits over a GB of ram usage with just a couple of tabs in use and then starts lagging like crazy.
I have similar problems at home with the newest build.
But more on the Tree Style Tab. I just love it. I wish they would add that in as an option for large screen setup. That makes far better use of screen estate.
If you don't like my foot up your ass, I can give you instructions to remove it.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
I keep 0 history. Soon as my browser closes, history is wiped. So if this simply looks at my history and serves me adds based on it, then hypothetically this would not work on my system.
Of course if they look at other things (or FF stores info in some hidden super cookie) then I will be subject to adverts like everybody else.
Are you sure about that? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...
It's been broken for some time. Install SQLite Manager addon to see what data is still lurking.
"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."
First the advertisements will be optional. Then they won't be.
.
How long before the few remaining Firefox users realize that Mozilla is behaving like any other money-grabbing corporation?
I haven't liked Firefox for some time now. But, I use it because it's the web browser I dislike the least.
There is a browser perfect for you!
http://lynx.isc.org/current/
...
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.
Banner Ads, Pop-up ads, Tile Ads, whatever you want to call them, all need to go away. Ads are where a majority of the code that inflict malware on unsuspecting users comes from. Web marketing firms receive thousands, if not millions of new ads all the time. Do you really think they have someone or even a group of people that sit and look thru the underlying code of every single ad they receive? From the day that ads started showing up on sites I have refused to click on them or found tools to block them: ADP, Ghostery, Blur, etc. I even refuse to click the text ads that show up in google searches. Advertising is not a beneficial method to gain my interest in a product. At least not on the internet.
Palemoon is branched off of Mozilla. I use it and it works well.
There are lots of options out there... you don't really need to stick with the Firefox vs chrome vs opera arguements.
Out of interest is your dislike for optional and easy to opt out of advertising (tracking) in Firefox meaning you're going to switch wholesale to Chrome?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I guess I'm in a beta channel, though I didn't know it. I've had suggestion tiles for a while now. I was so pissed when the "sponsored" tiles showed up unannounced.
Researching them showed me that you could turn them off. So I did, and I was moderately happy that I didn't see them anymore, but I felt that Mozilla was still collecting the data which angered me.
Not many days later, I received an update and bam! The sponsored tiles were back. I turned them off again. Again, I got another update and the tiles were back on again. SO it seems that I can't actually turn them off as each time I do, Mozilla turns them back off.
I find it especially ironic that one of the tiles advertises Mozilla's campaign against government monitoring with a blue tile; "is the U.S. government watching you?"
Anyway... I suffered through the bloat, the slowness, the UI changes and forced upgrades that I didn't want because Mozilla was better and "respected my privacy". But since that has now turned into hypocritical lip service, Mozilla offers no advantage at all over Chrome which is faster, feels much lighter and I have no doubts about my lack of privacy.
Fuck Firefox! It's over!
think I using no-script and not crappy FF, sad to know !
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expect it to get worse.
Certainly agree with that point. A good application always checks with the user before enabling datamining or advertising features, or simply has them turned off by default.
http://www.seamonkey-project.org/
All the web-rendering goodness of FireFox. Stable user interface. No suggested tiles. Available for Windows/Mac/Linux.
I don't know any _user_ that wants this. This pretty much guarantees that I won't have Firefox anywhere.
Never really found a use for them. I have every new tab and window show up as a blank page so this won't bother me at all though I'm sad to see them take this approach. It appears that they are trying to do everything in their power to alienate what users they have remaining. Might have to start looking into a good alternative browser for the Mac.
Firefox gets its revenue from ads. Whether directly or indirectly, through first Google, then Yahoo, and now directly. They never seem to have enough revenue.
Wikipedia gets its revenue from donations. They occasionally have a beg bar at the top. They refuse to accept advertising. They always seem to have too much revenue.
I, for one, would much prefer to have an occasional beg bar in my Firefox and no ads, rather than ads and no beg bar.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
or use bleachbit and really clean it up.
Yup, or DeepFreeze to prevent it in the first place.
They only cure is to make sure that company doesn't get any of your money.
Or use a VM with snapshots or change logs, and when done, roll back all changes, so no matter how much the browser tries to stash, all gets eradicated.
It also works well to deal with compromised browsers, especially if the VM is run in its own NAT segment, so the compromised instance can't gain knowledge of network topology.
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...
Remember the days when your system could get p0wned the first time you visited a website in Internet Explorer? Well, thanks to technological advances by the Mozilla Corporation, you can now get p0wned by malware embedded in ads before you visit any website!
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Damnit, Google, finish adding Firefox-style tabs so I can ditch that piece of shit already.
I miss being able to do a google search, and the first few hits were generally exactly what I wanted.
Yeah yeah, I know, "use google-fu", but it doesn't really work anymore, not as well as it used to. The marketing droids and advertisers have their whole SEO thing now where they're actively out to cheat google to get you to browse to their crappy blog or whatever instead. Searching for anything technical gives you the first few pages of marketing blogs that copy-paste each other's heavily buzzword-laden summary, squelching the actual reporter or researcher that has real information.
It is obnoxious. I've day dreamed of making a TLD (.awesome or something) that has one specific requirement -- anyone can register a domain as long as you sign an agreement that you will NEVER DISPLAY ADS. Well maybe, a couple other requirements to try to cut down on the copy-paste news cycle. But generally speaking, if you search only .awesome addresses, you know you're getting legit content. That's what I want. That's what I could do in the early days of the internet. The internet has been destroyed by rampant greed and commericalism. I want those early days of hackers (in the sense of open source contributors, not malicious ones), professors and enthusiasts to come back. Do I just not know where to find them online anymore?
That would make a great bumper sticker. Even better, a bumper sticker on a police car.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
That's just making what DeepFreeze does complicated. DeepFreeze will keep a computer in a specific state, allow temporary changes but the moment your system is rebooted the system is back to its frozen state. Use external/flash drives/network/etc for saving. If you do need to make a change (install a program, patch, etc) you just enter a password, install, then re-freeze.
Far simpler than snapshots/rollbacks/etc. It doesn't provide the security you speak of but for day to day use that's not important.
So you're switching away from a browser that is still Free Software (which provides the ultimate configurability), the basis of variants (GNU IceCat, for example) that make it more convenient to respect your software freedom by only showing you Free addons by default, for a proprietary browser. And then you're getting lost in the weeds by debating the purported merits of one proprietor over another (Google vs. Opera) where you know so little about both such comparisons pale to what you give up by choosing any proprietary software.
I'd rather keep my software freedom, run more Free Software, and enjoy the wide variety of Free Software addons to help me keep browser privacy (NoScript, Priv3+, disabling Javascript-based clipboard manipulations, browser ID spoofing, and so on).
Digital Citizen
> Where do you think the million dollar super-star athlete salaries come from? Advertising.
This is provably not generally true. It depends a lot on the type of sport, but sponsorship money can be just a fraction of a pro athlete's income (whereas the majority could come from pay-per-view or ticket sales), or it can be a substantial part. Take Floyd Mayweather - the extraordinarily high paydays he makes come for the most part from PPV. No, I am not one who would pay to watch pro boxing, especially not Mayweather, but there are tens of millions who do.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
https://www.palemoon.org/
Click the link, and read. Browse the forum. They are very upfront about the fact that they are NOT Firefox, haven't been for some time, and never will be again. I think that fits the definition of "fork".
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Uhhhhh - no, it doesn't work with "all firefox extensions". Many, yes, all, no.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I certainly hope that Adblock Plus https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... will control this nonsense. I WILL NOT LOOK AT ADS IN MY BROWSER!
"But it's two-year-old level childish thinking at it's finest to think you can get all the free and subsidized stuff out here in the world without the advertising"
Well how about a subscription or money ? I value my privacy and not getting advertising more than anything else.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Advertising based on browsing history is the worst kind of advertising. All it is, is advertisements for the same product you already bought when you searched for it 2 weeks ago. Seriously, it's almost like recommendations on youtube. Youtube, I just watched 30 minutes of fail videos but I don't want to watch them again every day of my life, thanks.
I'm ready to get rich off the Firefox foundation the second my underage child gets an ad for an adult only site.
I hope Vivaldi gets to a usable state, but I really doubt it will wind up where I was hoping Opera 13 might of gone. You still can't use (most) extensions, and it looks like their plan for tabs are singular stacks, which are damned near useless once you get used to the freedom and functionality of Tree Style Tabs. Sidewise for Chrome/Opera comes close, but has so many quirks and issues as it has to run in a separate window.
(obligatory Star Trek reference)
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
If you believe the privacy and security claims of a large corporation whose sole purpose is to make a profit, then you just haven't been paying attention to the real world. You can also take the "advertising is inevitable" crap and shove it back where it belongs. There is enough connectivity between people these days through social media that advertising as we know it should go away! If something is worth buying then you will find reviews for it somewhere or find out about it through word of mouth. There are plenty of product driven companies that don't do any advertising at all that are doing just fine. Some are more than a century old!
In theory it is a couple of mouse clicks. The issue becomes how do you know? Without deep packet inspection you will never know what exactly your browser is sending to websites. The issue is not how trivial it is to turn it off, it is that now Mozilla as an organization is now in the ad business, taking my privacy is no longer a concern. The sheer fact that they are considering it means that my privacy has moved down the list of priorities for the foundation than functionality or user experience.
There is a reason I don't use Chrome. I can tell you for a fact that even with every privacy based extension turned on for all sites, Chrome can still phone home to google and give it anything the coders want. I don't like that and refuse to use Chrome for that reason. Now that Firefox is going down that path by their actions, the trust is being broken. Once trust is gone, everything fades.
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Like if people needed yet another reason to ditch Firefox for Chrome. Only thing that kept in in Firefox these last 2 years was tab management (which true is much better in Firefox), but all the rest was so far behind Chrome (speed and the current crashes and halts in some pages... Amazon for instance which is widely reported) that I took the plunge and learned to live with without the tab management system.
Isn't this what open source is all about, freedom? So take the source code and remove the data-collecting code and recompile. Otherwise, what good is open source?
It's all about transparency folks... and Mozilla is telling everybody exactly what they are doing... Same thing with Google... they post ad nauseum about what they are doing, and people still vibrate in place with outrage. If you don't want to use the product don't. No one is forcing you. The hilarious thing is people go on using Facebook and most of the time FB just does things without telling anyone until after the fact. People gripe about it but the number of FB customers keep growing at a healthy clip. Don't get me started on the shenanigans Microsoft pulls; and as far as yahoo is concerned their mail service is extremely distracting IMO with the way the ads pop up and flash, blink, etc.
To NOT use Firefox.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Tiles are nothing new; I immediately found them annoying and have always turned them off. These new "sponsored" tiles will only appear on the existing tiles page, which can still be turned off:
When you first launch Firefox, a message on the new tab page informs you what tiles are (with a link to a support page about how sponsored tiles work), promises that the feature abides by the Mozilla Privacy Policy, and reminds you that you can simply turn tiles off. If you do turn them off, you’ll get a blank new tab page and will avoid Firefox’s ads completely, including these upcoming suggested tiles.
So, it really doesn't matter.
Point is, they are making it opt-out, but saying it won't track you. And you have the code, so they are probably honest (no doubt somebody will check).
Yes, it does look bad. But no, it's not as bad as most people here are making it sound like.
Rethinking email
Yes, at that time websites also didn't have images, and about nobody could get to see one.
The images are Netscape fault, but I'd disagree about the ads. Are you blaming them on Netscape because of Javascript? If so, well, Javascript is indeed something Netscape must be ashamed for, but if they didn't do it somebody else would have done something worse (AKA VBScript).
Anyway, the web has ads because there are enough people to see them. Remove the people and the ads will go away, but there's nothing you can change on the software stack that'll get ride of them.
Rethinking email
> Ads Based On Browsing History Are Coming To All Firefox Users
Not this one. I've used Firefox forever. But if this can't be disabled easily, they're fucking gone.
Don't use Ghostery: They sell data to ad companies
Disconnect is one alternative.
Yeah, but I was actually researching text browsers a few days ago, so still had that link handy.
I mean, you can actually get tabbed browsing with CSS and some javascript support in a text browser with http://elinks.or.cz/
...
Don't forget to keep repeating this for every update, too. Hope you don't have a life/day job...
It is clear from previous Mozilla discussions that their operation has become overrun by middle managers that don't actually do anything except fuck things up. I had my last straw with Firefox this week when it crashed on YouTube several times. It is kind of a relief to see this story; now I can leave and never look back.
Vendors don't WANT to deliver advertising without tracking. Or, perhaps some vendors do, but marketers most assuredly will not allow this to happen. Tracking gives marketers an incredible amount of information, but they use that information not merely to advertise more effectively to you personally (although that is done too). By studying what works on you and what works on everybody else, and what doesn't work, they are able to dial in the broader strokes of general advertising to make it more effective on everybody. Comparisons are not possible if unidentifiable subjects cannot be distinguished between those who are influenced to buy and those who aren't. The people who actively
Oops, forgot I had started another thought and submitted. Anyway, the people who actively suppress advertising are still in the minority.
Simple answer:
discontinued Internet Explorer.
Now users need another software to download a different browser,
and the Mozilla Firefox has heroically taken the place of discontinued IE.
Advertising != tracking.
I am ok with advertising through duckduckgo.com,
they provide search services without tracking me, and manage to be financially sustainable.
Why should browsers be different, and spy on users?
what a bunch of hypocritical selllouts
i can hardly put into words how much i hate this kind of stuff. How dare they! Who do they think they are to "use" us like this? i'm sure almost everyone agrees...
Fork in 3... 2... 1...