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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.
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.
Honestly, at that point I'd rather switch to Pale Moon.
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.
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.
https://developer.mozilla.org/... Build Instructions
Dude... don't do that... some kids may try it and cause an explosion or something... you don't want that on your conscience!
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
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.
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.
Then you didn't read. These tiles show up when you click 'new tab'.
You will get a set of tiles that include your most viewed porn, porn you might like and sponsored porn that they hope you will be into.
You can stop these porn tiles from appearing by simply telling it you want classic new tab, not enhanced porn edition.
Of course this doesn't stop Mozilla from compiling a detailed list of your porn.
...
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://www.seamonkey-project.org/
All the web-rendering goodness of FireFox. Stable user interface. No suggested tiles. Available for Windows/Mac/Linux.
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)
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...
You can disable it... until they disable those options in the name of "cleaning the UI". Then you're hosed.