Mozilla Writes To European Commission About Facebook's Lack of Ad Transparency (betanews.com) 64
Mark Wilson writes: Facebook has been no stranger to controversy and scandal over the years, but things have been particularly bad over the last twelve months. The latest troubles find Mozilla complaining to the European Commission about the social network's lack of transparency, particularly when it comes to political advertising. Mozilla's Chief Operating Officer, Denelle Dixon, has penned a missive to Mariya Gabriel, the European Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society. She bemoans the fact that Facebook makes it impossible to conduct analysis of ads, and this in turn prevents Mozilla from offering full transparency to European citizens -- something it sees as important in light of the impending EU elections.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It should be the DoJ (Score:4, Informative)
DoJ is America, European Commission is European.
In terms of rules and friendliness to corporations they are very different. A liberal America is still a conservative (Probably closer to middle of the road) Europe. Telling Facebook what to do from the DoJ or the SEC just isn't going to happen.
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Yeah and a European conservative is probably considered liberal or closer to the middle of the road for the US.
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It doesn't matter what they call themselves unless you believe the Nazis choosing to call themselves socialist mean they were socialists
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DoJ is America, European Commission is European.
Both Mozilla and Facebook are American companies... This is an example of jurisdiction shopping (trying to find a regulator who is friendly to your point of view instead of the one who is appropriate to your location.)
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While we're at it, what we really need is something like Brave's wallet/patron system to go global and burn the ad industry to the ground.
WTF is "Brave"?
What about Mozilla's lack of ad transparency? (Score:1, Flamebait)
HEY MOZILLA! How much money are you getting to integrate Pocket into Firefox?
Re:What about Mozilla's lack of ad transparency? (Score:5, Informative)
https://assets.mozilla.net/ann... [mozilla.net]
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It's publically available if you would have taken two seconds to look. Mozilla bought and owns Pocket.
I did look, but they didn't exactly trumpet the fact that they spent $30M of donations on something nobody asked for, while simultaneously ignoring those things people did ask for, like a clean browser without unnecessary features built in when they belong in extensions. Since I didn't know they actually bought them, I didn't know where to look. Now that I do, I can see the articles which were published about it at the time.
Re:What about Mozilla's lack of ad transparency? (Score:5, Insightful)
Trouble is no one can agree what unnecessary features are.
You might reasonably argue that anything that can be an extension should be an extension.
Unfortunately that makes Firefox out of the box kind of annoying and useless. For many users if they have to download a bunch of extensions to stop it sucking, they'll just think it sucks and go right back to chrome. So features that are technically unnecessary are socially necessary in order for Firefox to maintain its market share.
Also another thing is that Mozilla is championing the cause of the open web without spying. In practice that means they need to provide services that people like Google provide in order to do so in a way that isn't evil.
That's their reasoning and its sound in general. No idea if its sound in the case of pocket though.
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You might reasonably argue that anything that can be an extension should be an extension.
Unfortunately that makes Firefox out of the box kind of annoying and useless.
I see that response to that argument all the time, but it's silly. Just bundle all the extensions needed to make it a typical browser with the install. This has obvious benefits. I can just not install them, or at least disable them once the install is complete. Also, they can be updated by the user independently of the browser, so it's an opportunity to deliver updates for those components without the user having to redownload everything.
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Also, isn't that available now anyway? It's FOSS so take out as much as you want I guess?
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But you'd still run into the situation of figuring out just what the non-exetension version of Firefox would include.
Browsing, bookmarks, preferences, and the most basic of pop-up blockers would be included — and all of those but browsing should be an extension. Everything else including Pocket, Web Developer tools, etc. would also be extensions, but which were not enabled by default.
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Logically, all of those things should be extensions. As should the Javascript engine, CSS rendering and all forms of video playback.
No, you need Javascript a) to run many extensions to begin with and b) just to browse the web any more. CSS, ditto. Video playback I could see going either way, but making that an add-on wouldn't be a horrible PITA on the same level as js.
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Just bundle all the extensions needed to make it a typical browser with the install. This has obvious benefits. I can just not install them, or at least disable them once the install is complete.
That would be nice, I agree. At least that last bit is already possible, you can easily disable Pocket by setting 'extensions.pocket.enabled' to false in about:config.
A lot of other unwanted Firefox features can be disabled in about:config. This project does a great job at keeping track of all of them:
https://github.com/ghacksuserjs/ghacks-user.js
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Wow. I'm totally reading this from you right now:
Mozilla should only work on what *I* want, because what *I* want is what "people" want. Forget what others want (they're not even people!). Forget the web. Forget working on making ads bearable until they can be replaced with a better solution. Mozilla should *only* be working on what *I* want! And you can totally trust me that I'm right about what Mozilla does, because I'm so well-informed that I haven't read their blog posts over the past few years and did
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Wow. I'm totally reading this from you right now:
No, you aren't. You're making it up in your own head.
Forget the web.
That's exactly what they have done.
And you can totally trust me that I'm right about what Mozilla does, because I'm so well-informed that I haven't read their blog posts over the past few years and didn't even know that Pocket is owned by them!
Yeah, read their blog. That's going to be a good use of my time. I can see exactly how they're ignoring the users.
Nobody asked for pocket. We had extensions that were superior, in that they didn't require giving some third party information on what we were viewing. Then they changed the plugin interface, and broke them.
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It's almost as if people expecting to do whatever they want to a piece of software without any repercussions is an impossible demand.
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It's worth reading TFA because it is much more interesting than the summary.
Mozilla wants to build some kind of in-browser tool to assist with the up-coming European elections. The tool will look at your Facebook feed and the ads you see an provide some kind of break-down on who is targeting you. Or at least it would have, but some recent change to Facebook has apparently made it impossible.
This kind of transparency could actually be a really powerful tool. In fact Facebook should build it in to their platf
Come on Mozilla, you should already know this... (Score:3, Funny)
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Mo$illa (Score:1)
Its time to regulate Facebook (Score:3)
Facebook has been given every chance in the world to act right. It was just a couple of years ago where Mark Z. thought it was "ridiculous" that his platform could be used to cause chaos in elections. If these people wanted to actually do something right for the world, they would rebuild this platform from the bottom up. If they wanted to help, they would shut the misinformation pipelines down and lead by example. I do not know one person that uses the site that appreciates political advertisements.
People should not have to be on high alert for propaganda every single second that they are on some site while checking their kids soccer schedule. People do not work this way. It is not an OK policy to teach people to recognize and ignore "fake-news" while acting like it doesn't affect people. One of the primary ways propaganda works is by bombarding people with misinformation, even if they know its a tabloid, click-bait headline. Simply by using brain power to try to ignore what one is trying to see, it registers in people's thoughts that they have seen this. Human beings do not simply ignore this stuff. It is not how the human mind works. Human beings can not be bombarded with this stuff without it affecting them.
Facebook's game plan seems to be, if something happens, don't change the model but add an investigative department to sort out the worst of the worst. This may work in a court of law to "prove" they are trying but this does not solve the issue, and its not genuine. For these platforms to not be propaganda machines, it can not be allowed in the first place.
At this point, because Facebook will not take action themselves, it is time to regulate Facebook. As far as I'm concerned, Facebook and the rest of its platforms should only be able to run ads for products and services until there is a true method to the madness. It is not OK to test these new band-aids on their user-base, when their user-base is 2.1 Billion people, 1/4 of the planet.
These platforms are causing immediate and irreparable harm to the world, and it is not possible for them to unwind this one ad at a time. These products and their models need to be rewritten from the ground up for the common good of the planet, and to genuinely work in favor of the end-user and society in general.
--
A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa. - Mark Zuckerburg
Stay away from politics (Score:2)
I like Firefox, but i wish Mozilla would stay away from politics.
Same applies to other organizations and companies by the way. Just focus what you do, and don't waste effort on lobbying or playing the public. Even despite other actors do. Just don't. Stay cool. Stay pro.
Zuckerberg for prison (Score:1)
After what came out yesterday of Facebook deliberately stealing information from children for profit, it is clear that Facebook must be shut down and Zuckerberg and Sandberg put in prison.
Block all ads (Score:2)
No ads and the ability to show no tracking.
Replace Facebook (Score:2)
My ad-free decentralized open source Facebook replacement fantasy (FaceNet):