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by ineptech
665 days ago
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You're preaching to the choir, but even preaching needs to be truthful and I don't think calling Mozilla ad-tech or suggesting that it's just as bad as Google is remotely true. This is where "the perfect is the enemy of the good" comes from. I mean, what do we have now? Google and a bunch of middle-man ad techs are hoovering up everything they can get, including a crap-ton of stuff that browsers can't affect at all, and wink-wink-promising that they anonymize some of it in some cases even though no one can verify that. A world in which the subset of that data that passes through a browser has been provably anonymized would seem to be strictly better, even if you still don't like it. |
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Mozilla is literally an ad-tech company. They bought and now own an actual ad-tech start up, they are partnering with Facebook to develop and implement protocols like DAP, and they are currently working on turning firefox into an ad platform that will deliver reports of people's browsing history to marketers in exchange for money. In what way are they are not an ad-tech company exactly?
I'll admit that they aren't as bad as Google, but they're heading in that direction and they've also only just gotten into the ad-tech game. It took Google a long time to get as evil as they are now.
Rejecting firefox because of Mozilla's new role as an ad-tech company and their insistence on exploiting firefox users isn't the perfect becoming the enemy of the good. Surveillance capitalism isn't good. Maybe standing up for ourselves and our values by saying no to spying from Firefox will cause Mozilla to look to other options. Even if it doesn't, it will keep us from being exploited and tarnished by our participation in their decline.
I've been a firefox user from the very beginning. My first browser of choice was Netscape. I hate that the enshittification of firefox is here, but I won't ignore it any longer. We still have a few alternatives like librewolf that provide the benefits of firefox without the recent corruption, and there's some hope on the horizon with ladybird too. The internet is only in the sorry state it is now because we've conceded too much to advertisers. We need to start holding ourselves and the software/services we use to a higher standard or it's only going to get worse. If Mozilla suddenly wants to be a part of the problem, I'll leave them behind while I look for a new solution.