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.
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 in 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 partner 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.
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 occasionally accidentally open the fandom page for a game on Chrome with no ad block (which I keep around for Google apps) and it’s unusable. Go there on Firefox with ublock origin and it’s fine
And there’s worse sites than that
Download sites for things like Minecraft mods have several competing “download” buttons without ad block
It’s nuts people might accept these, let alone want them
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.