This happens in every major mastodon thread. Someone claims something without even bothering to research it like the person below did. They make an incredibly big deal about it with tons of claims (which are almost all untrue) and then it gains traction and anyone who doesn’t bother to research now believes something completely untrue.
I’ve read the “learn more” bit now and I’m going to leave it switched on. (although I use uBlock anyway 😅)
I think this is a legitimate attempt to ‘fix’ the internet. It seems only very basic information on interactions with ads is recorded by the browser, and then it is anonymised. As an example, the advertiser should only receive counts of how many people bought a product after seeing a particular ad. I don’t think they can see what webpage anyone in particular came from, but maybe they can see that: 11% percentage of visitors came from example.com/some-page
Presumably the anonymised data is only provided once the pool is fairly large and wouldn’t show 100% of visitors came from cornhub when you only had one visitor 🤷♂️ Obviously websites will always see an IP address.
The idea is for this to substitute for traditional, more invasive, tracking. I think it may one day achieve that.
A warning though: I only just started reading about this.
Excuse me while I go and click that ‘learn more’ button…
I’m surprised that no one has commented on the Mastodon post’s author recommending people ‘use a privacy concious browser like Chrome’. What a way to invalidate her arguments
Must be an account thing because mine is unchecked.
I saw all this fuss yesterday and checked on my laptop and sure enough, mine was unchecked.
NICE TRY FEDZ
Someone tell me pls which browsers are developed by actually decent people? I’ll switch
If you’ve already read through this and understand what it means and are still worried about your privacy, I would recommend you switch to LibreWolf - it takes all the best practices of hardening Firefox for security and works out of the box. Unfortunately, this means you can’t play certain videos, it doesn’t auto-update, and some - likely many - websites will break/not work. This is the price to pay for true privacy. If you don’t want that, just keep using Firefox.
I’ve been using Librewolf for years and pages not working are extremely rare.
That and the pages that don’t work are trying to force a fingerprinting/tracking technique you shouldn’t want to allow anyways.
Or they use WebGL. I keep a chromium install jest for that.
Or they use WebGL. I keep a chromium install just for that.
Sure. Firefox is developed by lovely people.
The article is a huge misrepresentation and the author is an idiot.
