I think this is actually a decent strategy actually when you read the article.
This is Mozilla trying to innovate something better than tracking, and I’m fairly privacy conscious.
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2024
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This is the second time I've seen PPA and reading the details also shifted my opinion somewhat - at first glance (and based on comments elsewhere) I thought this was FF implementing FLoC or some other Google-invented adtech which sends data to advertisers and enabling it by default.
But from what it sounds like, this is really advertisers/websites providing the information to your browser so it can do conversion tracking locally then anonymously reporting the resulting conversions to an aggregator. Only the information that a conversion happened is transmitted so this is nothing like FLoC where your interests are shared, just the fact that X number of people viewed ad Y and subsequently performed action Z (such as making a purchase).
Combined with the fact that this reduces advertisers need to rely on individual tracking in order to know whether ad Y led to action Z and this could potentially be an off-ramp / compromise to de-escalate advertisers use of tracking by providing them the key metrics they want to know about ad effectiveness through a system that doesn't make individual tracking easy.
Now the pessimist in me totally believes that they will use this new system while still aggressively using every other method of tracking shotgun style, but if this proves reliable to them then I think it's plausible that advertisers will put up less of a fight when we add more privacy protection against traditional tracking. But that's assuming that advertisers feel that this new system provides everything they want and won't be at risk of being crippled. Otherwise yeah they'll totally cling to the old way of tracking ad conversions.
They’re going to try and use this as more tracking for sure but….. it’s at least an attempt.
But they’ll always want more data because they think they’re smart and can use random little bits of info to make it better, even if that’s not real. They think it’s real and that’s all that matters.
So I won't have a feature like this enabled if I can help it.
But it does kind of seem well intentioned. There are a lot of advertisement systems that are paid based on how many sales they actually create. The ways to do this are with tracking of some sort, which is a privacy nightmare if you give advertisers any control of it, or doing what products advertising on podcasts do and jacking up prices steeply enough that you can tell people "get a 30% discount with an advertiser code". Neither of those are great. If the browser provided a valid alternative that could only be used for specifically attributing ad conversions, and they eliminated all that other tracking, they might be able to lower some of the incentive to turn it into an arms race of new techniques. (Probably not, but it's not the worst aim.)
Now, I can't stand ads, and have managed to eliminate my exposure to them almost completely to live sports and product placement (and some billboards/signs I guess). (Brandwashed has some of my reasons, knowing the psychology side is more of it.) This won't change that, or any of the rest of my efforts to limit the ability to spy on my behavior. I will never allow tracking or advertising I can prevent. But I could see a path to it being better for the average consumer who's not militant about blocking all that.