I think he’s being a bit dramatic with the headline, but there is a new advertising API that you need to turn off they opted you into. This advertising scheme is supposed to give you privacy and assist advertisers so they don’t utilize abusive tracking schemes, but you have to treat anything Meta is involved in with suspicion. Between uMatrix, uBlock Origen and my Pi-Hole DNS\/Unbound servers with over a million domains blocked, it shouldn’t be an issue. But you have to question Mozilla’s board seats from who they get money from, so we’ll need to keep an eye on them going forward. And perhaps time to look at the other projects that take Mozilla’s code and ramp up the privacy protections. As this opting you into this ad API and telemetry is not a good look.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.osnews.com\/story\/140247\/i-told-you-so-mozilla-working-with-facebook-to-weaken-firefox-privacy-and-anti-tracking-features\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n By Thom Holwerda <\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve long been warning<\/a> about the dangers of relying on just one browser as the bullwark against the onslaught of Chrome, Chrome skins, and Safari. With Firefox\u2019 user numbers rapidly declining, now stuck at a mere 2% or so \u2013 and even less on mobile \u2013 and regulatory pressure possibly ending the Google-Mozilla deal with makes up roughly 80% of Mozilla\u2019s income, I\u2019ve been warning that Mozilla will most likely have to start making Firefox worse to gain more temporary revenue. As the situation possibly grows even more dire, Firefox for Linux would be the first on the chopping block.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve received quite a bit of backlash over expressing these worries, but over the course of the last year or so we\u2019ve been seeing my fears slowly become reality before our very eyes, culminating in Mozilla recently acquiring an online advertising analytics company<\/a>. Over the last few days, things have become even worse: with the release of Firefox 128, the enshitification of Firefox has now well and truly begun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Less than a month after acquiring the AdTech company Anonym<\/a>, Mozilla has added special software co-authored by Meta and built for the advertising industry directly to the latest release of Firefox, in an experimental trial you have to opt out of manually. This \u201cPrivacy-Preserving Attribution\u201d (PPA) API adds another tool to the arsenal of tracking features that advertisers can use, which is thwarted by traditional content blocking extensions.\u21ab Jonah Aragon<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n If you have already upgraded to Firefox 128, you have automatically been opted into using this new API, and for now, you can still opt-out by going to Settings > Privacy & Security > Website Advertising Preferences, and remove the checkmark \u201cAllow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement\u201d. You were opted in without your consent, without any widespread announcement, and if it wasn\u2019t for so many Firefox users being on edge about Mozilla\u2019s recent behaviour, it might not have been snuffed out this quickly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n