from Hacker News

Make Firefox Private Again

by eloy on 8/21/24, 3:57 PM with 334 comments

by mrinfinitiesx on 8/22/24, 12:54 AM
wasn't aware that 'anonym' existed. I don't care if PII is stripped or not. the answer to 'helping advertisers' or anything with advertisement metrics in any fashion is always 'No.' - training things so that there's better data on how to best manipulate our psyche / give people data to psychologically manipulate us in to buying/doing things is a hard 'No.'
> Asked whether Mozilla has any concerns that its user base, many ardent ad-blockers among them, will oppose Anonym, a spokesperson for the Firefox house told The Register advertising as a business model is what allows the internet to be free and open to everyone, though there's still room for improvement.
No, the internet being free and open is what allows advertisers to exploit us. They can find other business models other than advertisement. It's not our problem. They need to stop making it our problem.
I turned it off in about:config
by replete on 8/21/24, 11:09 PM
My guess is that this[0] means we might see some manifest v3 type stuff happen in the future as ad blocking becomes a conflict of interest for Mozilla.
[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/18/mozilla_buys_anonym_b...
by Vinnl on 8/22/24, 7:27 AM
Here's the Firefox CTO explaining the motivation behind the experiment controlled by this setting, and the measures taken to ensure that it actually is private:
https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_abo...

by 3np on 8/22/24, 3:24 AM

Here is the actual script, if you prefer copy-pasting a one-liner over curl|sh...

    echo 'user_pref("dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled", false);' | tee -a  $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/$(grep "Default=.*\.default*" "$HOME/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini" | cut -d"=" -f2)/user.js

by red_admiral on 8/22/24, 8:08 AM
From the CEO's comments on reddit (https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_abo...):
> we support people configuring their browser however they choose
I rate this one as half true. If you leave firefox for a while and come back, it displays a bar with text like "Would you like to refresh your experience?" The first time I clicked that, it uninstalled my adblock extension. Not making that mistake again.
by Yodel0914 on 8/22/24, 6:55 AM
I recently switched to LibreWolf[0] and, after tweaking a few settings that were more zealous that I'd like, it has been just as good as vanilla FF.
0: https://librewolf.net/
by cjpearson on 8/22/24, 7:38 AM
I really don't like advertising. I use uBlock Origin in my browser, AdGuard on my phone and pi-hole in my home. I even take a seam ripper to my clothes to make sure no logos remain. But I understand that advertising is the only viable business model for much of the internet. (Browsing HN and seeing that the top comment for every paywalled article is a pirated link confirms that.)
If advertising must exist, I'd prefer it to be safe and private rather than the malware-ridden surveillance machine that exists today. Mozilla is working hard to make this happen and catching a lot of flak. It's notable that criticisms usually fall into three buckets.
1. It has "advertising" in the name, thus it is bad
2. Meta is involved, thus it is bad
3. Mozilla earns most of their revenue from Google, thus they are incapable of doing a good thing
It would be much healthier if criticisms actually focused on the design and implementation of PPA. Perhaps things could be improved. Or maybe you have your own ideas for privacy preserving advertising. But it surprises me that even on a technical forum like HN, so many people endorse the awful advertising status quo.
Yes, you can mostly opt out of advertising with uBlock Origin. You can still do that when PPA is enabled. The vast majority of browsers will continue to subsidize your browsing. What Mozilla is doing is working to provide the same level of privacy and security for the 90% of the population who does not use uBlock Origin. I think that's a noble goal.
by SCdF on 8/22/24, 6:49 AM
I just want to use a robust, secure and decently fast browser that uses a different backend than Chrome to support the open web not ossifying into a single browser spec. I'll pay monthly!
Please just let me pay for this in money and not my privacy :-(
by jqpabc123 on 8/22/24, 12:15 PM
There is a form of advertising that doesn't invade your privacy and doesn't need metrics. It is called "context sensitive" advertising.
This is what happens when you go to a web site dedicated to pets and you see advertising related to pets. It's reasonable to assume you have an interest in pets; otherwise, you probably wouldn't be there. No metrics required.
"Personalized advertising" is what happens when you go to a web site dedicated to pets and you see advertising for automobiles because you did some searching 3 weeks ago. What the "metrics" don't tell the advertiser is that he is wasting your time and his money because you already bought a car last week.
"Personalized advertising" is just plain dumb. It is a way to waste your time and advertiser's money with a false sense of confidence that this is not the case.
This explains why more than half the users on the internet are now taking active measures to block this annoying stupidity. And Google is actively trying to counter this trend.
The only question left to answer is at what point will advertisers wake up and smell the coffee and realize a different, more privacy respecting approach might be just as effective for the same or maybe even less money?
by zczc on 8/22/24, 6:47 AM
More privacy-related about:config settings: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Privacy/Privacy_Task_Force/firefox_...
by pointlessone on 8/22/24, 10:27 AM
Why does this have to be curl | sh if there’s a checkbox in the settings for this specific setting? Do you value your privacy so much that you’re ready to run arbitrary script directly from internet?
by stuartd on 8/21/24, 10:48 PM
A bash script to set a config value…?
I’ve been blocking ads in Firefox since you used CSS to do it [0] but let’s face it, advertising isn’t going away.
Advertising is annoying, but tracking is evil and I hope initiatives like this can pave the way to having ads while not compromising user privacy.
I’ll still block them, though.
[0] https://www.gozer.org/mozilla/ad_blocking/css/ad_blocking.cs... (love it that site is still up!)
by red_admiral on 8/22/24, 8:05 AM
What I'd really like is to edit the file (sqlite database?) where my "ad topics" are stored. Just because I search for X once doesn't mean I want to see ads about it in future.
Someone should write instructions for this for both firefox and chrome.
by kuon on 8/22/24, 12:20 PM
Do you know the list of domain we can block to do this at the firewall level?
I already block firefox.com and mozilla.org (developer.mozilla.org is exception for MDN).
by OutOfHere on 8/22/24, 3:52 AM
`dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled` already was false. If you're having to set it manually in `about:config`, you're likely missing something bigger in `about:preferences#privacy`.
by yu3zhou4 on 8/22/24, 7:56 AM
Author mentions this: https://web.archive.org/web/20181120211720/https://make-linu...
pti=off spectre_v2=off l1tf=off nospec_store_bypass_disable no_stf_barrier
Looks like a set of kernel params that turn off security features to speed up the OS. Did anyone test it in practice?
by kreyenborgi on 8/22/24, 7:54 AM
https://support.mozilla.org/no/kb/privacy-preserving-attribu... explains what the setting is about, the important bit being:
```
  > 3. Firefox creates a report based on what the website asks, but
  > does not give the result to the website. Instead, Firefox encrypts
  > the report and anonymously submits it using the Distributed
  > Aggregation Protocol (DAP) to an “aggregation service”.

  > 4. Your results are combined with many similar reports by the
  > aggregation service. The destination website periodically receives
  > a summary of the reports. The summary includes noise that provides
  > differential privacy.
```
The above docs also tell you how to turn it off with mouse clicks in regular settings (I don't understand why OP proposes to set it using the command line, perhaps so they can run it as a cronjob in case it gets reset? ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ ).
-----
The intention of the project seems to be that the surveillance economy should switch over to this less invasive method of tracking you, and that perhaps if only Everyone did that then they would stop doing the worse tracking. Good intentions, but I'm guessing the only real effect it will have is to make some people stop using Firefox, most people not even notice it's there, and trackers will just use this as yet another input among their many other inputs. (OTOH, maybe Mozilla gets paid a lot for this aggregated data, I guess that's "good".)
by DavideNL on 8/22/24, 8:31 AM
Strange, apparently the setting (dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled) still hasn't been added to Arkenfox user.js ?
I see it's mentioned and committed, but not in the latest release yet.
https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js
by leotravis10 on 8/22/24, 6:25 PM
You have to make even more steps to make it somewhat more private although keep in mind, it's not for everyone: https://unixdigest.com/articles/choose-your-browser-carefull...
Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30043918
by adr1an on 8/23/24, 9:07 PM
I'm fine with Firefox finding ways to compete with Chrome. For me, its survival depends upon it. And with its survival, we get all sort of forks (tor browser, librewolf, and so on) for niche users like HN readers commenting here and myself (Yes, privacy is niche. I would like a different reality, but that's how it is.)
by jmakov on 8/22/24, 4:08 AM
Can this be also disabled on Android?
by blackeyeblitzar on 8/22/24, 3:50 AM
Really sad to see Firefox’s direction but also not sure how they should be funded to avoid these things. I’m also not sure that the web can be made into something different unless web standards aren’t freed of influence by giants like Google
by ikekkdcjkfke on 8/23/24, 5:34 AM
Giving arbitrary actors control to target you and load whatever they want in your browser window is an uneeded liability. I have seen for myself people getting scammed by ads. No one was held accountable.
by clcaev on 8/22/24, 12:21 PM
Perhaps we could have a search engine that indexes only pages free of advertising?
by modzu on 8/22/24, 4:05 PM
mozilla going all in on advertising as a hedge against losing their google funding? it is sad. i support brave, but if brave went away whats left? did we lose?
by oriettaxx on 8/23/24, 9:16 AM
I can't wait to have Kagi/Orion browser available in my laptop (already in my iphone, SUPER!)
by account42 on 8/22/24, 6:24 AM
curl | sh for THIS? Riiight, let's give that website permission to execute arbitrary code on your computer just to change a single FF preference? Really????
by robaxisal on 8/23/24, 4:38 AM
when will people learn that piping scrips from internet to sh, is very insecure....
# curl https://make-firefox-private-again.com | sh
sigh
by kelnos on 8/22/24, 5:07 AM
This is absolutely disgusting. Despite Mozilla's general decline, I always want to believe they're going to do the right thing by their users. But this is really hard to swallow.
Advertising is unethical psychological manipulation, full stop. I don't care if the delivery or targeting mechanism is supposedly "privacy-preserving" (yeah, right). Ads themselves, even completely untargeted ads, need to go.
by horsawlarway on 8/22/24, 2:28 PM
Ditch Mozilla. Full stop.
They are hand-in-hand with Google - Bought and paid for.
by LordShredda on 8/22/24, 11:27 AM
It's disabled on Arch by default. Maybe choose an operating system that doesn't treat you like a product?
by nonrandomstring on 8/22/24, 12:15 PM
Since my post critical of Mozilla is being rather savagely downvoted I'll just leave this here [0]
[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/you-are-too-dumb-for-tech/
by willywanker on 8/22/24, 7:27 AM
Or use Pale Moon, forked long ago and developed independently, that respects your privacy out of the box without needing 50 different 'hardening' Arkenfox type changes or having to keep watch every time Mozilla tries to screw over end users like this. Zero telemetry, zero advertising and no mental gymnastics over how we're financially dependent on Google but still value your privacy. And bonus, it retains XUL extension support and the full customizability that went with it (including full support for full themes that can make it resemble Chrome or modern Firefox if you want to).
by dinozarw on 8/23/24, 7:29 AM
```
  # How to use: 
  # curl https://make-firefox-private-again.com | sh
```
Can we please stop telling people to pipe curl into sh?