cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/23894598
Despite its emphasis on protecting privacy, Mozilla is moving towards integrating ads, backed by new infrastructure from their acquisition of Anonym. They claim this will maintain a balance between user control and online ad economics, using privacy-preserving tech. However, this shift appears to contradict Mozilla’s earlier stance of protecting users from invasive advertising practices, and it signals a change in their priorities.
69% of the world population doesn’t use ad blockers. Google made their billions from people clicking on ads.
Not only are we technical folks, only 5% of the population, not their target audience, it seems most people don’t care enough about ads to ever try to stop them… at all.
That’s really nuts to me when I run into it in the wild. It’s so easy and such a qol upgrade. I know a guy who self hosts a bunch of services, programming job, but does not use any ad block at all. He’s on the computer all day. Just looking at ads.
I don’t think you’re wrong, but I do think that if everyone thought that, they would be doing it already.
I have routinely tried to get friends and family to use ad-blockers and they simply don’t care enough to even attempt to download one.
Nice.
I installed local-network-wide DNS adblockers. After the change my mother found me and asked me why she couldn’t see the ads: she needed the ads and were enjoying them.
That is fucking epic. I had (not anymore) a similar issue with my wife and ads about shoes and coats. So I allowed all the crap on her devices only on Adguard Home.
Then her phone died, I gave her mine with GrapheneOS on it,until she could get a new one. The first 2 weeks were a pain: “where’s the playstore?”, “what is this gayscale chrome (Vanadium)?”, “My banking app keeps crashing”, etc. After a while we started spending more time doing things together, she was spending more time with the kids, and was being way more productive I was her business.
Long story short, she kept the phone, I ended up getting a new one, and she even asked me to remove Windows from her computer and set her up with Fedora.
It’s a habit thing, I think.
My wife has slowly been walking away from everything like that too. The hard part is she has done a lot in marketing & now wonders if it is all bullshit/evil, but it is still needed even for the good products & services, just not in deceptive or manipulative manner.