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Mozilla acquired Anonym, an ad start-up
(blog.mozilla.org)
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this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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Becoming an ad company while trying to put privacy first seems like a conflict of interests in the making
As Jamie Zawinski put it, it’s like a non-profit animal shelter setting up a sideline selling kitten meat to satisfy demands for hockey-stick growth. If somebody castigates them for it, they can point out that the demand for kitten deli slices didn’t going to go away, and if they didn’t sell them, someone else would step in and do it less humanely.
There's actually a real world example of this. Some cats that are disected in schools are euthanized cats from shelters, because the alternative is cat farms that breed cats just to be killed and disected
It's not, at all. When you drive by a billboard on the highway, is it invading your privacy? There's no reason there can't be a digital equivalent.
Possibly?
Let me rephrase it a little- When you walk past a digital advertising screen at a Westfield Shopping Centre - is it invading your privacy? (The answer is a definite YES, they have facial tracking and keep metrics on where you go in the mall, how long you loiter in certain locations, what stores you go, whether you came back out with bags, etc)
Once again, that is an issue with implementation, and not an issue inherent in advertising in general.
That's what I always say. Targeted advertising should be illegal. Contextual advertising is acceptable.
If I'm on the star trek wiki, serve me ads for star trek, sci-fi, and whatever. You don't need to know anything about me specifically.
We'd still need to do something about like ads that take up too much space, hurt page performance, or introduce malware, but removing the stalking would be an improvement
Contextual ads can be simple images/html without 20 thousand scripts buried in
Right, and something like Reddit makes targeted advertising SUPER easy, with zero personal information.
Want to know what kind of products I might be interested in? Literally just ask.
Worse than being a pro-privacy company that utterly depends on Google?
Advertising doesn't need to be privacy infringing. That's something from the last 20 years. No conflict of interest necessary if all they do is ads.
It’s definitely making their job harder on the face of it, but it also differentiates them from other ad companies, so I guess they’re betting on that being a draw for potential clients.