You:
What is transmitted is not user activity.
Mozilla:
When a user interacts with an ad or advertiser, a record of that interaction...
User interactions are not user activities to you?
You said
All user activity remains local in the browser
The pertinent information is that you were incorrect. That should be a big enough red flag for you to reevaluate how safe and secure you think PPA is.
When a user interacts with an ad or advertiser, a record of that interaction is... sent to two independently operated services.
How much do you think Tailcat cost Brave? I know Mozilla must spend more money doing legitimate browser development, but they also spend a whole lot of money doing entirely unrelated things.
If it was less than $65 million, the amount of money Mozilla committed to AI and VC back in 2022, it could have been the money they purchased Tailcat with back in 2021.
Mozilla was surprisingly close to having its own search engine, if you count its partnership with Ghostery several years back. But Brave, a company with presumably fewer resources, bought it out.
How about Reddit or DeviantArt? I've noticed issues with each of those
That's a fair thing to bring up. I think your point went over my head, because I was mostly reminiscing about how the less capital-oriented parts of the internet were relatively pleasant before companies like Facebook came along and encouraged them all (with their newly acquired capital) to jump into the big centralized areas.
So you wish to change in order to avoid admitting things change?
Well yes, but it's the patches that make them special. Every Firefox fork that disables Mozilla PPA by default is another browser that cuts into Mozilla's attempt to resell private data to advertisers while marketing it as private (which is, I kid you not, a reason they say they needed it enabled by default).
And considering Firefox itself is still open source, it's a completely valid browser to base a fork off of. Especially when the only serviceable alternative is Chrome right now.
The dot com bubble made the Internet explode, sure, but corporate sites weren't the entire internet back then. There were far more niche sites, web rings, forums, etc...
LWD
joined 11 months ago
You said Mozilla couldn't purchase a search engine by implying they didn't have enough free money, so I gave you an example of them spending $65 million. I just thought to myself, "isn't it interesting that they missed an opportunity to directly monetize something," and I shared it with you.