[glenstein]

A much more valid argument! But also a change of subject.

The previously mentioned side bets, e.g. VPNs, Pocket, Relay, Fakespot -- there's been a narrative attempting to imply that those involved a trade-off from, well, sometimes the argument was quality of the core browser experience, but in this particular variation it's suggesting that these side bets were a reason they couldn't maintain commitments to privacy.

The adtech purchases absolutely do raise an eyebrow, but they have nothing to do with this narrative that attempted to tie the side bets to compromises on privacy. If anything, I want to encourage them to do more of these, precisely because they don't involve any of those compromises and everyone seems to want them to diversify their sources of revenue in non-adtech directions.

[eadmund]

All those distractions cost money, and wanting more money is the reason that they are not maintaining their commitment to privacy.

If they had instead invested that money sensibly, they could have used it over time to do the only thing that the world wants from Mozilla: pay for developers to work on Firefox.

[glenstein]

>All those distractions cost money

It's like a never-ending horde of zombies that keep coming and repeating the same argument. So as ever, my reply is going to be the same. Sure, they cost money, but they cost more or less, and they either do or don't cost engineering resources, and they cost more or less of those as well. Nobody can articulate what the missing browser feature is, that's not there because of this bet on side bets. No one can articulate the relative scale of the investment on side bets and what the impact is on engineering resources and no one can draw a connection between that and market share (if anything, it's the relatively inexpensive resource demand that probably made them attractive strategic options to begin with). And none of this is responsive to actual macro-level forces that drive market share, which is Google leveraging its footprint in the search space, in Android, and over Chromebooks to drive up its own market share.

And those are the things you would have to think through in order for any of that argument to work, not just hand-wave toward their possibility. The ability to trace cause and effect, the ability to assess the relative scale of different investments, these are all like the 101 level things that would sanity check the argument.

[laweijfmvo]

  > Nobody can articulate what the missing browser feature is, that's not there because of this bet on side bets.

The promise to never sell our data.

[ImPostingOnHN]

The option I don't see listed in your post is for the developers to do nothing except for maintain, fix bugs, fix CVEs, maybe comply with new standards, maybe find ways to make it faster.

[mmooss]

> A much more valid argument!

No it's not. Read the article linked: The adtech company is developing advertising solutions that preserve privacy, with the goal of changing the ad industry. It fits directly with Mozilla's core mission and also a long-time project they've pursued internally.

[glenstein]

I want to stress that "more" is relatively speaking. I think squaring the circle on "privacy preserving" ads involves sliding definitions of privacy that I'm not super comfortable with. Certainly a move in the right direction, but, unlike with all the other side bets, if someone is pointing to the adtech stuff I feel less comfortable dismissing them as uninformed.

[mmooss]

> I think squaring the circle on "privacy preserving" ads involves sliding definitions of privacy that I'm not super comfortable with.

What is the definition they use?

I suspect you might be, paradoxically, doing the same as everyone else; piling on based on rumor or impression.

[glenstein]

>What is the definition they use?

The notion of 'privacy preserving' ads, or that the data they are selling is not in some sense 'about you.'

I talk about this in a couple of other comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=43212048

https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=43212010

[mmooss]

I don't see how aggregate data is 'about you' in a way that impacts privacy, unless they aggregate it from just a few users.

From one of your linked comments:

> Abstracted profiling still works, and digs deeper than you might suspect (I recall the netflix data that could predict interests across different categories, like people watching House of Cards also liking It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia).

Abstracted profiling (if we're talking about the same thing) predicts things about the user - otherwise it wouldn't be valuable - but the question is whether it identifies the user.

> It's also just part of the long slow, death by one thousand cuts transformation into a company that doesn't have categorical commitments to privacy

They've been doing privacy-preserving ads for - a decade? It's not part of a transformation. The claim that Mozilla "doesn't have categorical commitments to privacy" would need to be stablished, unless 'categorial' means 'absolutely perfect in every way'.