Mozilla has acquired Anonym, a trailblazer in privacy-preserving digital advertising. This strategic acquisition enables Mozilla to help raise the bar for the advertising industry by ensuring user privacy while delivering effective advertising solutions.
About Anonym: Anonym was founded in 2022 by former Meta executives Brad Smallwood and Graham Mudd. The company was backed by Griffin Gaming Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Heracles Capital as well as a number of strategic individual investors.
It’s a bit of a stretch to turn “may also” into “main purpose is”, but you’re right - that shows that indeed it’s not a big leap to use it for advertising.
But no, as I understand it, this isn’t extracting sensitive data from users and then only keeping it in anonymised aggregate form - the sensitive data is handled on your device and never reaches Mozilla, and the anonymised aggregate form (i.e. the high-level category derived from that data) is the only thing that’s actually sent.
And again, it’s always been an ad platform, it’s still the only proven way to fund development.
I won’t comment on this acquisition, cause I have no idea what this company does.
They cannot aggregate or anonymise the data locally on your device, because that requires combining it with data from other devices. They can only water it down a little, just like google does with Floc or whatever they call it now.
The difference between this and the minor act of selling out that is their main source of income is enormous and seems too obvious to need commenting on. The difference between this and something more comparable such as sponsored links in Pocket is indeed that they are starting to collect audience data to enable it. It’s a small start, but it’s a major departure from the already somewhat distasteful situation people were accustomed to.
As I understand it, the way it works is that the aggregate categories are defined beforehand, e.g. "these sites are part of the “animals” category. So then if you visit any of those sites, your local install will match them against that list, and then share the aggregation outcome (i.e. “you visited an ‘animals’ site”), without having to share the specific site you viewed - which thus Mozilla can’t even know.
Right, no doubt it’s something like that. So in short it’s sending information about your web browsing habits to Mozilla so that they can better inform their advertisers of who they’ll be reaching with their sponsored url bar suggestions.
Sometimes I forget that there are people who would have no problem with that. But after all, billions of people are happy to use Chrome.
Yeah, and the main difference to me is that that’s not going to sway elections or disclose a journalist’s sources or expose a human rights activist or something like that.