Acceptable Ads is bullshit on many levels:

• It’s made by an ad company
• The same ad company runs multiple popular ad blockers (including AdBlock Plus)
• There are no standards on privacy invasion

uBlock Origin, or at least uBlock Origin Lite on Chromium-like browsers, are must-haves.

The best browser you can set up for a family member, IMO, is Firefox. Disable Telemetry (which should rid them of Mozilla’s own ad scheme too), install uBlock Origin, remind them to never call or trust any other tech support people who reach out to them, and maybe walk them through some scam baiting videos.

I’m still evaluating which Chrome-likes are best at actual ad blocking, and the landscape is grim.

…For now. Looks like they’re going to get rid of it too (which makes sense, because they copy Chromium’s codebase).

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/extensions-chromium/developer-guide/manifest-v3

I think that’s the point: Google has been shutting down Manifest V2 extensions one step at a time, and it’s been experimenting with anti-ad-block tech on YouTube with one user group at a time.

With all due respect, Mozilla is now (and, for a while, has been) an ad company. When an ad company tells you ads are necessary, you should not trust them. Plenty of lousy things have been entrenched as social norms, but it is the job of the entrenchers to justify their existence… Which Mozilla is definitely not doing here.

Private, for-profit, and let’s not forget antagonistic to the GDPR.

If I need to fudge info, I tend to put it into a password database’s “notes” field for easier note-keeping, FWIW.

Not a full-on identity, but bits of info like stated name, address, etc.

Extremely intended! They built a model to lie and a surrogate model to say the first model was being truthful.

They called it LaundryML.

Considering the news about OneRep… Definitely steer clear of Mozilla’s scrubbing service.

OneRep is what Mozilla uses to remove your data from the internet, if you pay them for Monitor Plus.

Didn’t somebody make a biased AI and a laundering AI to say it wasn’t biased, just to demonstrate how easy it was to do?

I assume steering too, right?

i.e. a “If you brick your car’s firmware, at least you can keep driving without unreasonable levels of difficulty or distraction” situation.

This is where I got the screenshot from:

https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-policy

Here’s the internal meta-ticket on shopping2023, along with some stuff on fetching ads from servers

And here’s their announcement:

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/fakespot-joins-mozilla-firefox-shopping-announcement/

(Before Mozilla bought this company, its privacy policy was changed to allow transfer of private data upon sale – all of it, not just the training model. Here’s the old policy for comparison to their April 25 version; 7 days later Mozilla made the acquisition announcement)

Make sure to check your Firefox about:config for “shopping2023” or whatever flag they called it… Soon we’ll all have Fakespot installed

I remember a long time ago when Avast came highly recommended, at least back when I had gone looking for reviews. Back when antivirus was still more or less a necessity.

Oh boy, I sure do hope this happens to other companies that do it!

Wouldn’t this also cause them to charge more to make up for lost paying customers? 🤔

I trust Linda to run Twitter the same way I trust Ashley to run Vought: responsibility and without deference to a creep with a god complex

A $2 million raise just made the CEO worse at running Mozilla. Honestly, if you think the company should hemorrhage money that rapidly, who’s the one that hates it?

The CEO is making an inordinate amount of money. $6.9 million is excessive.

You can argue that Mozilla should be held to the same low standard as every other corporation, but if you do that, you have to take into account that the Mozilla CEO got a huge pay raise in a year where other CEOs got less money.

They’re reselling it for $13.99/monthly or $107.88/annually.

So it’s cheaper if you buy it for just one month at a time, but more expensive for the annual subscription… And there are other alternatives besides.