Mozilla enabled ads in Firefox and they're active in Fedora

[Nikos Roussos]

On 11/16/2014 08:24 PM, Christopher wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 16, 2014 at 6:46 AM, Mustafa Muhammad
> <mustafaa.alhamdaani at gmail.com <mailto:mustafaa.alhamdaani at gmail.com>>
> wrote:
> 
>     On Sat, Nov 15, 2014 at 4:25 PM, Lars Seipel <lars.seipel at gmail.com
>     <mailto:lars.seipel at gmail.com>> wrote:
>     > So Mozilla has recently gone live with its advertisement tiles on the
>     > "New Tab" page. Only newly created profiles get to see this stuff.
>     >
>     > On a pristine F21 install using Gnome, when first launching Firefox,
>     > users are presented with a number of tiles, depending on screen size.
>     > One of those is a so-called "sponsored" tile chosen from a range of
>     > available advertisements (e.g. for booking.com
>     <http://booking.com>, there's also one for the
>     > Snowden movie), apparently depending on geographical location.
>     >
>     > When this "feature" got originally announced[1], there was a
>     discussion
>     > on -devel if this kind of stuff is really appropriate for Fedora.
>     >
>     > Some time later Mozilla seemed to have canceled the feature, quoting
>     > "That’s not going to happen. That’s not who we are at Mozilla." as one
>     > of the reasons[2].
>     >
>     > Apparently, they (again) reconsidered, pushing the feature to
>     nightlies
>     > a few months ago. Well, it now hit the stable branch and, therefore,
>     > Fedora.
>     >
>     > This is how Mozilla pitches the feature to advertisers[3]:
>     >
>     >> To support ad personalization, Mozilla created an internal data
>     system
>     >> that aggregates user information while stripping out personally
>     >> identifiable information. Mozilla can track impressions, clicks,
>     and the
>     >> number of ads a user hides or pins. Its advertising partners are also
>     >> privy to that data.
>     >
>     > Personally, I don't think that showing advertisements on the free
>     > software desktop is appropriate. Our users are supposed to be able to
>     > fully trust our software. That's one of our most-often touted
>     strenghts.
>     > I don't think the ability to "track impressions, clicks, and the
>     number
>     > of ads a user hides or pins" is something that is compatible with
>     that,
>     > regardless of this data being tied to "personally identifiable
>     > information" or not.
>     >
>     > Firefox's behaviour is probably nothing extraordinary on the other
>     > platforms Mozilla is targeting. Compared to the prevalent attitude of
>     > proprietary vendors, especially on mobile, it doesn't sound that bad
>     > anymore. I don't think that's a suitable scale for Fedora, though.
>     >
>     > From a user perspective, it's not that hard to disable the
>     feature. Upon
>     > first seeing that page a tooltip is shown to hint at the possibility.
>     > Users can choose between three modes, "Enhanced", "Classic" and
>     "Blank".
>     > Contrary to what is stated in the Mozilla kb[4], the only one that
>     > actually disables the ads is "Blank", which is equal to setting
>     the new
>     > tab page to about:blank.
>     >
>     > What does the community think of it? Is it okay for our flagship
>     > applications to carry ads and report tracking data?
>     >
>     > [1]
>     >
>     https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2014/02/11/publisher-transformation-with-users-at-the-center/
>     > [2]
>     >
>     https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2014/05/09/new-tab-experiments/
>     > [3]
>     >
>     http://www.adexchanger.com/online-advertising/mozilla-finally-releases-its-browser-ad-product-hints-at-programmatic-in-2015/
>     > [4]
>     >
>     https://support.mozilla.org/de/kb/how-do-tiles-work-firefox#w_enhanced-tiles
>     > --
>     > devel mailing list
>     > devel at lists.fedoraproject.org <mailto:devel at lists.fedoraproject.org>
>     > https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
>     > Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
> 
>     The "ads" are not intrusive, they don't collect personally
>     identifiable data, and can be disabled with a selection from a button
>     on the start page!
>     See:
>     http://www.pcworld.com/article/2848017/how-to-get-rid-of-firefoxs-new-ads-on-the-new-tab-page.html
> 
>     I think the best way is to ship Firefox as is, if somebody doesn't
>     want to help the open source project generating some revenue using
>     these ads, he can disable them.
> 
> 
> The framing of the concerns expressed here as people not wanting to
> contribute back and help an open source project with revenue (through
> this mechanism or otherwise), does not reflect the concerns raised. The
> concerns raised are that the default configuration is an "opt-out" vs.
> "opt-in" model of Firefox issuing network calls back to Mozilla's
> servers, and Fedora's user base expects "opt-in" for these sorts of
> things. It's not about not being willing to help the project out... it's
> about not being able to vet that method of helping out prior to it
> taking place.
>  
> 
>     When you use Google search engine in any browser, it is collecting
>     more data than this feature in Firefox.
> 
> 
> This doesn't seem relevant to this discussion, unless Fedora browsers
> are automatically, and without the user's explicit knowledge or
> permission, navigating to Google's search engine, which (AFAICT) they
> are not.

Same happens with these tiles. No data is sent back to Mozilla unless
you *choose* to click one of the promoted tiles.


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 801 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20141116/e1c004eb/attachment.sig>