back to article What's up with Mozilla buying ad firm Anonym? It's all about 'privacy-centric advertising'

Mozilla this week said it has acquired ad metrics firm Anonym, touting the deal as a way to help the online advertising industry support user privacy while delivering effective adverts. Essentially, Moz has bought an outfit, founded in 2022 by former Meta executives, that among other things helps advertisers and ad networks …

  1. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

    If it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit

    Privacy centric advertising is inherently self contradictory.

    It's too much to expect that Mozilla could actually stop wasting money and just improve the browser, isn't it?

    I'd suggest what people actually want is not so much privacy centric advertising, it's advertising that is small and unobtrusive (the old days of mini text adverts), doesn't slow down a site, and preferably doesn't track users.

    1. Anna Nymous
      Holmes

      Re: If it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit

      I somewhat disagree with

      > Privacy centric advertising is inherently self contradictory.

      Billboards with paper on them don't track you (themselves, inherently - there are other ways to track who passes by them but that's not the billboard doing it)

      Advertising can be done in a privacy-respecting way. It's just that advertisers choose not to do that because they have been conditioned to wanting meaningless analytics (and thinking they aren't meaningless).

      A simple ad online that does not phone home or records its hits, is not impossible. It's just that there's a whole market now for selling people online. And so that market fights for its preservation with FUD.

      On the side: I don't know a single person who actively likes advertising. At best (for the advertiser), they "reluctantly abide with prejudice".

      There's not a thing in the world that doesn't get destroyed when it's touched by advertising!

      1. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

        Re: If it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit

        OK, I needed to be more precise : privacy centric *effective* advertising (as per the article) is inherently self contradictory.

        True, with billboards it's possible to target people by sticking the bill board outside places where their target market will pass. Print or online ads can be placed in publication/sites or articles related to their products. Both will be more effective than randomly sticking the advert somewhere.

        It's really unlikely this is what Mozilla is talking about though, isn't it? Sooner rather than later they'll want to target individual users rather than sites, and that requires breaching privacy.

        1. DS999 Silver badge

          Re: If it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit

          Why does advertising has to use personal information to be effective? Advertising has been around a lot longer than the ability to amass all this information, and I think the effect of personalized ads is overrated anyway.

          Just by using Firefox, advertisers can infer something about the people they are advertising to. Non-personal information like whether they are running it on Windows, Linux or Mac and so forth can further supplement that.

          They might not make as much they can make with Google/Facebook style privacy raping advertising, but as a non profit they only need to make enough to remain a going concern. They don't have to answer to shareholders who might vote out a CEO who doesn't rape privacy in exchange for bigger shareholder returns.

          1. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

            Re: If it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit

            corporate leaders lie, almost nothing they say is actually true, remember that.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: corporate leaders lie, almost nothing they say is actually true

              Just like Politicians then. How many proven lies did Trump spout forth during his term in office? AFAIK, it was around 30,000...

              Now he's trying to stop the DOJ banning him from lying about the FBI wanting him dead... I'd guess that a lot of FBI agents would privately want him 6ft under if only to protect their jobs and lives but not officially.

              Lets' face it people, telling porkies is a way of life for the elite these days.

              Adverts are IMHO 99.99999% lies.

              There is a reason that I don't watch TV/Cable/Satellite as broadcast... that is the seemingly endless ad breaks followed by minutes of channel specific ads. What should be a 57 minute prog can be as little as 35 mins these days. Sky... your free to air channels are the worse offenders esp SkyMix. Almost everything I watch is recorded first and I skip over ads.

          2. heyrick Silver badge

            Re: If it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit

            "and I think the effect of personalized ads is overrated anyway"

            This.

            I buy a new shaver. The ad flingers find out and start sending me more adverts for shavers. They're a scummy parasite that pisses people off and ultimately makes products more expensive thanks to their delusions.

            I would imagine the "hit rate" wouldn't be so different to simply having a random number generator to spit out a completely random advert without any of this profiling nonsense. Because the last bloody thing I'll be looking for after buying an X is another X...

            1. DS999 Silver badge

              Re: If it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit

              Yeah some of the ads make no sense. The only thing I can think of is that the advertisers figure maybe you'll buy that shaver, find it lacking, and return it, so the ads are there in case you need to buy again.

              But I agree it makes more sense to advertise for something more consumable like food. If I do an online order from my grocery store and buy a certain brand of frozen pizza, other frozen pizza brands would justifiably think it is worth advertising to me, because before long I will eat that pizza and maybe I will want something different next time.

              If I buy a tool like a circular saw, advertising circular saws to me is probably pointless (other than the "maybe he'll return it" scenario above) but odds are decent I will buy other tools so it makes sense advertising those to me. The problem with that is, all the cordless tools have incompatible battery systems so once I own a few tools of a certain brand I'm pretty locked in and am unlikely to buy from a different brand due to the hassle of having two different batteries with two different chargers.

          3. user555

            Re: If it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit

            The networks are doing it for one simple reason - It's a competitive advantage over traditional ad methods. This in turn is wiping out the competition.

            What is really needed is the top to bottom banning of tracking entirely. This then puts them back on a level playing field.

          4. ThatOne Silver badge
            Unhappy

            Re: If it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit

            > Why does advertising has to use personal information to be effective?

            Because that's how marketing goons get their kicks. They have decided that knowing what size underwear I wear will help them sell me a car, and there is no talking them out of this: "You can't have too much information", explained to me a senior marketing person I'm acquainted with.

            In other words, in a profession which is actually purely black magic, they have a number of supposed magic formulas which are supposed to bring luck, fortune, the return of the loved one, and all that.

            1. DS999 Silver badge
              Trollface

              Re: If it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit

              If you buy XXXXL underwear, they will show you ads with vehicles advertising how wide the driver's seat is and how the adjustable steering wheel allow it to clear your belly. If you buy XXS they will show you an ad for a Mini.

      2. ecofeco Silver badge

        Re: If it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit

        "... they have been conditioned to wanting meaningless analytics (and thinking they aren't meaningless)."

        Exactly this.

        1. Anna Nymous
          Coat

          Re: If it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit

          To develop this a bit further: I don't think that those analytics are in any way different from voyeurism or vanity, plain and simple: I want to know who has seen "mine" so that I can make vacuous claims about the size of my membe^W audience, because quantity beats quality.

          There's a reason advertiser networks don't get paid on commission of conversion via ads. It's because they know they don't work... If they really believed it worked, then they'd be willing to be paid on conversion.

          Icon is the adman helping themselves to your wallet...

        2. UnknownUnknown

          Re: If it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit

          ‘Advertising Effectiveness’- the power to topple the £€¥$tn Jenga tower of advertising bullshit that everyone is paying hundreds (thousands for some currencies) of £€$¥ annually for - advertising tax levied in ‘cost of doing business’ on the cost price of almost everything you buy. … and people complain about the BBC Licence fee … ROFLMAO..

          YouTube add - I click mute with a gleeful passion and the *only* focus I have is on the Skip-Ad arriving.

          Same with Sky recordings - fast forward.

          Same with ITVX forcing ads on you - mute and wait for skip.

          1. Irongut Silver badge

            Re: If it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit

            You Tube has ads? Not on my TV.

            Use STube rather than the official app and not only are there no ads but it cuts sponsor sections too.

            1. J. R. Hartley

              Re: If it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit

              Cheers for the heads up. How does it cut the sponsor sections though? Does it detect someone shilling a VPN and skip?

              1. Tom Chiverton 1 Silver badge

                Re: If it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit

                > How does it cut the sponsor sections though? D

                Uses the SponserBlock API I imagine

        3. Snake Silver badge

          Re: meaningless analytics

          Because those who do not heed history are doomed to repeat it - these morons went to school to learn merchandising yet nobody bothered to teach them, or they failed to learn the lesson of, the Ford Edsel. Market researched to death...a complete failure. They heard what they only wanted to hear. Like other statistics, the lie is how you wish to interpret them.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: If it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit

        All of this.

        I have zero trust in any collaboration between Agents of Advertising and any browser company. The very moment Mozilla get into bed with such in a way that compromises users privacy their goose is cooked.

        And it's already a pretty small goose. So I do wonder, if such actions are designed to kill them off. /tinfoilhat

    2. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

      Re: If it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit

      Mozilla lost its way when they started pretending they had a ceo who is supposed to do ceo type things like lie and buy things.

    3. rg287 Silver badge

      Re: If it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit

      Privacy centric advertising is inherently self contradictory.

      Hardly. Contextual ads ("I have a user looking at this article about the new BMW i3. Would you like to place an ad?") is both effective and privacy-preserving. No different to placing an ad in a magazine (which people still do). You're simply targeting a class of viewer, not a specific user.

      I'd suggest what people actually want is not so much privacy centric advertising, it's advertising that is small and unobtrusive (the old days of mini text adverts), doesn't slow down a site, and preferably doesn't track users.

      That's what privacy-preserving ads tend to be, yes. Not necessarily the unobtrusive bit (that's up to the site devs), but contextual ads are fast - because you don't need a dozen different trackers to query your different brokers and middle-men. In fact the whole thing could be server-side - "user looking at page <x>", auctions the spot, receives the ad and places it in the page "natively".

      They also tend to be cheaper for the advertiser and provide more revenue for the provider - because you're not losing that cut to all the data brokers in the middle.

      1. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

        Re: If it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit

        Who gives a shit if they are cheaper for the advertiser ?

        What is wrong with you that you worry about the adveriser or google, because you can be sure they dont give a flying fuck about you or anyone.

    4. katrinab Silver badge
      Windows

      Re: If it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit

      Back in the previous century, the ads printed in newspapers and run on broadcast TV channels were "privacy preserving", and they made a lot more money than ads make today.

      1. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

        Re: If it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit

        THe problem with online advertising and why its such a plague is becaue its a relfection of American social values, where everyone is selfish and everyone be damned. Its hardly a shock with tehse values, that america is also the king of the world in terms of tv evangelists who think everyone shoudl listen to them and give them money.

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: If it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit

      Love it or hate it, it's ads that put Mozilla's staffers into houses and sends kids to school, etc. No ads means going for a paid-for browser (or one built by volunteer effort alone). Both approaches have been tried, neither particualrly successful.

      Targetted ads are worth more than blanket and so there is always going to be push towards that in some form.

      Browser "protections" in apple land are utterly laughable and so it's a very low bar for Mozilla to outperform. I have strangely no experience of recent MS ecosystems because I've avoided them so actively.

      1. DS999 Silver badge

        Re: If it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit

        No one is saying "no ads", people are saying "no personally targeted ads"

    6. Zippy´s Sausage Factory
      Unhappy

      Re: If it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit

      Privacy centric advertising is easy - use the keywords off the page and deliver static images. Monitor only the number of click throughs.

      Sadly, it doesn't yield as much revenue as the modern day tech robber barons would like, so surveillance capitalism is generally the order of the day.

  2. parrot

    No search engine

    Quick question, sort of relevant but a bit tenuous, I’ve often thought it’s a bit annoying that there’s no obvious easy way of setting up the address bar in Firefox so it doesn’t search. Why can’t we have it like in the old days, where a malformed url just goes nowhere? I know there’s a risk of malware from typo squatters but for most stuff I use bookmarks anyway and if I do press enter too quick when typing a url I’d rather see an error message than trigger a search query.

    Any thoughts? Am I missing something?

    1. ecofeco Silver badge

      Re: No search engine

      https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-suggestions-firefox

    2. Alumoi Silver badge

      Re: No search engine

      about:config

      Create browser.urlbar.oneOffSearches (if it's not present) and set it to false.

      keyword.enabled set it to false.

      Could be more but it's past midnight over here and my memory is kinda sleepy.

      1. parrot

        Re: No search engine

        Thanks for that. I’ll give it a try :)

      2. parrot

        Re: No search engine

        Unfortunately that didn't work but I found instructions to set keyword.enabled to false which worked for me, after I'd switched off search suggestions. Now I have separate address and search bars which I much prefer.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "in the past few years have led to efforts to reconcile privacy and advertising, most notably Google's Privacy Sandbox, a set of notionally privacy-preserving ad technologies intended to take over from the intrusive data collection enabled by third-party cookies"

    Nah. This is the marketing provided by Google. What it's really about it giving more control to Google. Remember they control the proprietary browser that most people use (not to mention all the other services they control), they can get whatever info the want without the need for those 3rd party cookies, but other ad serving providers wont.

    1. ITMA Silver badge
      Devil

      "What it's really about it giving more control to Google. Remember they control the proprietary browser that most people use..."

      You mean when Microshite aren't trying to ram Edge down everyone's throat at every opportunity?

      1. Zippy´s Sausage Factory
        Unhappy

        Edge might be all right if it weren't for "EdgeWebView" which every so often goes insane on my machine and locks me out of every site on the web. Have to clear all browsing data to fix it.

        Sigh

    2. ThatOne Silver badge

      > Nah. This is the marketing provided by Google.

      No, it's not marketing, it's actually the truth: Google's Privacy Sandbox intends to change the data collection by third parties to an exclusive data collection by Google.

  4. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    " helps advertisers and ad networks measure how well online adverts are performing"

    The results might come as a bit of a shock. At the very least the ad networks will want to keep the results from the mugs advertisers.

  5. Sora2566 Silver badge

    This is now a huge conflict of interest for Mozilla, and I'm upset to see them do this.

    1. remainer_01

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqyUAtzS_6M

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Do you think this will affect adblockers?

  6. CorwinX

    They don't account for people like me

    Hopefully not alone.

    If I'm advertised at, unwillingly, then there is not only zero chance I'll buy the product - I'll blank the entire company. Permanently.

    Even if I fancy something like what they're offering, I'll find an alternative on general principles.

    They never seem to measure the negative reinforcement side of annoying people with their inane, ubiquitous, annoying, beef by-product.

  7. keithpeter Silver badge

    Pointless

    When using a browser without any form of ad blocking on a laptop that does not have a list of advert servers to block in /etc/hosts(*), I find that the 'targeted' adverts are always looking in the past.

    As a concrete example I bought a 5 metre cat 5 cable off e*ay some months ago. Since then on that particular browser/machine I've had all kinds of adverts for networking products ranging from cables (lots of cables) to routers. Pointless! A better example would be a simple food mixer. Again, tons of ads for mixers followed. Just how many mixers do these algorithm managers think I need?

    Its like the apocryphal story of the little girl a decade or so ago. When an advert for a cartoon film came on the telly, she piped up along the lines of 'stupid, don't they know we have bought that already?'

    https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

    Old post but still good

    * in education, the online learning tools we use tend to use cookies &c so I need to 'drop shields' to use these tools as intended

  8. Long John Silver
    Pirate

    Privacy v intrusion, and tranquillity v annoyance

    Mozilla, and other Internet dependent enterprise, can explore and proselytise any mode of advertising they like. However, my bottom line remains: I refuse to accept or view advertisements unless I am actively seeking a specific type of product or service. Thereby, I miss the prospect of 'an opportunity of a lifetime', a 'fantastic bargain in an unrepeatable offer', or the chance of being envied for purchasing and displaying 'designer' tat and bling such as grossly expensive watches, but I can live with that.

    Therefore, I am not in the least interested in what Mozilla and other companies are doing, or proposing to do, except in one respect: persistence of independently produced free (or pirated) tools capable of stemming the deluge and of preserving anonymity, unless I happen to choose otherwise. So far, the Internet ecosystem independent of commerce has managed to remain a step ahead of enterprise and government intrusion. A major facilitating factor being the existence of operating systems (e.g. Linux varieties) wherein users co-operate in devising protections.

  9. J. R. Hartley

    The title is no longer required

    "a spokesperson for the Firefox house told The Register advertising as a business model is what allows the internet to be free and open to everyone"

    Bollocks.

    Facebook != The Internet

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Marking likely meatbags for fraud

    All that data on browsing habits reveals who are the most likely meatbags to be susceptible to fraud (as defined by law) . $12.5 billion was reported lost to online fraud in 2023, a 22% increase from 2022. Then there is the not-illegal fraud - bad deals and money sucking worthless subscriptions - probably worth at least an order of magnitude more.

    After my mother entered hospital and I was checking her answering machine everyday, the were dozens of fraudulent-ish messages per day, which I had to delete one by one. HIPAA is useless.

    In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, Baker's salary rose to in excess of $3 million. In 2021, her salary rose again to more than $5 million, and again to nearly $7 million in 2022). She is now executive chairwoman, and Laura Chambers is interim CEO.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What does this mean for adblockers?

  12. Pelican Express
    Pint

    Best of both worlds

    > touting the deal as a way to help the online advertising industry support user privacy while delivering effective adverts.

    Buying that ads agency is overkill. Firefox can make advertisers AND Firefox users happy by some programming:

    - Create a built-in ad-blocker

    - For every ad blocked, just report to the advertiser that the ad had been seen

  13. jlturriff

    None of this is at all reassuring. I've long been skeptical of Mozilla's claims of privacy respect and user-friendliness. Just look into Firefox's about:config database (why does it make me think of MacroShaft's registry?) and count the number of URLs Firefox talks to; and just try to use it to customize the user interface: obscurant variable names and values, no user-accessible documentation.

    To paraphrase a famous politician, "Firefox is the worst of the web browsers except for all the rest."

    If, perhaps, Icecat could keep up to date with Firefox that might be a solution, but with no dedicated support for it, that's not likely.

  14. StrangerHereMyself Silver badge

    Profitable

    The question is whether "privacy preserving advertising" will survive if targeted, privacy-invasive advertising is ten times more profitable. What will Mozilla do when advertisers aren't interested in web users' privacy but crave more money and sales instead?

    Will they derate the privacy preserving features quietly without anyone noticing (very unlikely no one will notice)? This could turn into a PR disaster which could dwarf CrowdStrike.

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