Today, we’re unveiling Anonym Private Audiences: a confidential computing solution allowing advertisers to securely build new audiences and boost campaign results.
Anything that supports the surveillance capitalist economy is just fuelling the continued exploitation of our attention and private data. Get to fuck, Mozilla CORP.
Firefox: We’re the “privacy” browser
Also Firefox: But I’m sure they won’t mind if we shamelessly erode that privacy. Just a little, and we can always gaslight them into thinking people asked for it.
For those who haven’t read the article, the suggested solution is for advertisers to obtain similar user IDs by using their own user list; it has nothing to do with gathering user data from the browser.
It is utilized in conjunction with other differential privacy technologies that gather user information and classify users.
In fairness, Mozilla needs a means of making money if anyone hopes Firefox or Librewolf to exist in the long run.
Mozilla needs a means of making money if anyone hopes Firefox or Librewolf to exist in the long run.
Mozilla Corp needs a means of making money if they want to continue paying their directors millions of dollars a year. The software projects, not so much.
Yes, Mozilla makes enough from search engine royalties to perform its original mission. But it got too much money from those royalties and bloated itself into a lumbering hydra.
In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:
- Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
- Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
- There is no 3.
It has been shown repeatedly that “differential privacy” can be exploited to de-anonymize the users whose data has been aggregated.
If you read Mozilla’s description of their Private Audiences system you immediately ask, “what happens if an advertiser has an audience comprising a list of ‘known opposition party supporters’ and generates a new ‘audience’ based on that profile? Do they then get an expanded list of opposition party supporters to target?” Yes of course they do, because that’s entirely the purpose of this system.
Waving their hands and saying it uses ephemeral machine learning models and differential privacy does not solve the inherent societal problems with allowing targeted advertising.
