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Scary_le_Poo@beehaw.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

It is not targeted advertising. There is an entire writeup about it that you haven’t read (obviously). You clearly have no idea how it works.


Advertising tracking, but less creepy

First, we need to go over Firefox’s Privacy-Preserving Attribution, or PPA for short. Marketing attribution is the process for tracking how many sales, conversions, or other goals originate from a given advertising campaign. For example, when Nike releases a new pair of shoes, it creates multiple ad campaigns to market those shoes on TV, Instagram, and so on. Attribution is how Nike tracks how many shoes were purchased from a given advertisement.

The most popular way to track attribution right now is with individual tracking. For example, you might click on a web ad for the Nike shoes, and a cookie is stored in your web browser. If you buy the shoes, Nike’s store might check that cookie, so it knows which ad was responsible for convincing you to buy shoes. There are many other ways for attribution to work, but most of them use individual tracking like cookies, which allows other information to be collected with the marketing data. For example, Nike’s marketing people might want to know which ad you clicked on and your estimated age, so they know which demographics are buying the most shoes.

Mozilla’s PPA aims to build an attribution system without the creepy individual tracking. Sites can ask Firefox to monitor attribution for advertisements, and then later ask for a report, which is only provided in an anonymized collection “combined with many similar reports by the aggregation service.” For example, instead of Nike getting something like, “Billy Bob, aged 29, was one of 728 people in June who completed a purchase from the Instagram ad,” Nike would get something more like, "47% of the people who clicked the Instagram ad in June completed a purchase."

There are other privacy and security measures in Privacy-Preserving Attribution, and Mozilla’s support page and Andrew Moore’s blog post explain it in more detail. PPA seems like a decent idea to track the effectiveness of ads without compromising user privacy in any meaningful way.

spacebar.news/mozilla-firefox-privacy-preserving-…

Now that you know better, please stop spreading bullshit.

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