Well, Mozilla seems to be making some pretty questionable decisions, So I’m considering switching browsers for the third (Is it the third?) time. The thing is, I really like the way Firefox works, so I’ve been trying out the more famous Forks like Waterfox and Librewolf, although I’m going for Floorp. However, I’m wondering: is using a fork enough? I mean, they are Forks maintained by other people, but is there a chance that whatever Mozilla does to Firefox could affect those Forks? Should I jump to a totally different browser like Vivaldi?

  • grandma@sh.itjust.works
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    3 months ago

    So instead of multiple providers tracking people all the time there will be a single company doing it, but it’s okay because I should trust them for what reason? Why wouldn’t tracking companies just use their own tracking on top of this new technology?

    • lowdude@discuss.tchncs.de
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      3 months ago

      I didn’t read too much into it, but roughly speaking: Because the technology by design aggregates data immediately and drops any personal identifiers/ the unaggregated data in the process. Other companies can build whatever they want on that, but if done properly, it is impossible to reconstruct user-specific data points and profile the users that way.

      This type of privacy-preserving aggregation technique is not new, it is fairly common for things like demographic data, where you want to know things like population density and incomes for some area, without just publishing an exact address with corresponding income for every person (as an example).

      Edit: I think I missed your point a little bit. I am unsure, but it seemed that Anonymous is responsible for designing the framework, not doing any tracking (i.e. it wouldn’t necessarily be “put all trust into them collecting it”). Maybe rolling out that technology could be done in a way of blocking other tracking, or maybe it is intended as a basis for regulations to take up. Maybe someone else can give more informed input on that.