Chances are that you might have heard about #Firefox "Privacy Preserving Attribution for Advertising". I've been working for Mozilla for 12 years and I've learned about it here on the fediverse, not only because I haven't been paying much attention, but because internal comms have been occupied with other stuff. So let's talk about something I feel Mozilla desperately needs: transparency. 🧵 1/11

First of all let's make something clear. I've seen people claim that Mozilla has become an ad company because Mozilla bought and ad company, but that's ridiculous: Mozilla's work has already been funded by ads for two decades. The first agreement signed with Google dates back to 2005. That paid for most of Firefox development, an ad-funded browser. Most of the internet is ad-funded at this point. You might not like it, I don't like it, but that's the way it is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances 2/11

So let's get that out of the way, Mozilla hasn't become an ad company, it already was. pretty much always has been. The company didn't really want to talk about it in these terms though. Which brings us to the second topic: ads are now heavily reliant on user profiling and tracking. That's bad. 3/11

The reasons why it's bad are rather obvious: most ad networks know more about you than yourself. Google in particular has an incredible view of your life, they probably know more about you than yourself, because they meticulously tracked and stored every interaction you had with them for as long as you've been online. 4/11

And it's not just Google. Every ad network is going to extreme measures to track you, because it is *profitable* to do it. And as long as there's an economic incentive, they'll do it. The only way to stop this is by removing the economic incentive to tracking. You'll still be served ads, but at least they'll be generic then. I don't know if PPA will achieve that, but the status quo won't. I'm 100% sure about that. 5/11

But what if you don't want to see ads at all? You can totally do that! There are very good and effective ways to block ads, and it'll make for a better online experience. But don't be under the illusion that will somehow change the current dynamics. Most services you'll see will still be ad-funded, and they won't be able to survive if they can't serve ads. Alternatively you'll have to pay to access them. Which brings us to another topic: donations. 6/11

I'm very happy about how the fediverse works, this is one of the few spaces that's ad-free, but I've been contributing to my instance, and I hope that my contributions make it possible for other users who can't afford it to join the fediverse too. Is this sustainable? Honestly I don't know. What I know is that browser development is not sustainable with contributions alone. Not by a long shot. 7/11

Firefox is currently made of 30 million lines of codes. Just running the test suites on a server costs a ton of money. You have to pay everybody's salaries, including the security people who are on-call 24/7 to respond to 0-days and similar security incidents. You have to pay for Sync storage and processing, you have to pay for download bandwidth, heck we need several people to deal with accessibility alone. 8/11

Which is to say, at the current time, Firefox development is simply unsustainable without ads being involved. Or Mozilla's management hasn't found another way, and believe me, we've changed a lot of managers. In the past 12 years I've had only two laptops, but I've been under 5 CEOs and 9 different VPs IIRC. Most of my colleagues have been around for a long time too, because we believe in what we're doing, but no matter how much churn we get in top management things don't really change. 9/11

Which gets us to another topic: Firefox forks! There's several of them with the most important being Tor, a browser that has a crucial role in internet health IMHO. All these forks are ad-funded too. Without Firefox, none of those would exist. Again, that's just the way it is, you might like it or not, but it was still ad money that enabled their development, because the code they use is literally 99,9% upstream Firefox (sometimes more, most forks just flip a few preferences). 10/11

@gabrielesvelto I think we need to bring #IceWeasel back.