3/24/2023 0 Comments Waterfox review![]() ![]() While the spy giants will disagree, it’s simply not true to say that advertising requires a massive spying apparatus that makes the US NSA look like dabblers by comparison. That’s where the web as envisioned by Google, Facebook, et al, has gotten us. In less than 20 years, we’ve gotten to the point where we hear “advertising” and immediately we think of massive spy networks that seek to know every single thing about each person in the world. With computers, though (including mobile devices), suddenly very granular, detailed information about each individual viewer is feasible in a way that ad execs from a few decades ago could never have imagined. Ad rates for newspapers and magazines were based on circulation figures and broad demographics, which was a very coarse level of information. Of course, those old-school ads never spied on us because they couldn’t. Ads were everywhere, and while they were often ugly and annoying, they didn’t spy on us. Radio ads didn’t spy on us, TV ads didn’t spy on us, flyers in the mail didn’t spy on us, billboards by the side of the highway or on the sides of buses didn’t spy on us. Advertising could be annoying, and frequently was, but it didn’t spy on us. That’s what really mattered to the advertisers, and it had been that way since before any of us was born. The effectiveness of such ads was measured in increased sales, or the lack thereof. Ads of that type are completely passive, and for most of the history of advertising, that’s how they have been. When I used to read paper magazines, they had lots of ads, but those ads never tracked how long I spent looking at them or assembled a dossier on which articles I had read or which other ads I had spent some time perusing. ![]() It’s been an assumption that advertising = massive spying for years, but there was a time, not long ago, when advertising didn’t involve spying. That may well come to pass, for all I know, but it means that there is at least an incentive for them to not do what Google is doing. It’s their niche in the market, and if it were to become known that they’re spying too, it would all be over for them. This gives the System 1 people an incentive to respect privacy. If it merely substituted one spymaster for another, there would be no reason for anyone to use it instead of the actual Google. ![]() The whole reason exists is to shield the user from Google spying. The big guys have absorbed, displaced, or destroyed all the smaller players, so it’s difficult to try to promote privacy in a web built on spying when you’re a little guy who can’t call the shots.Īs imperfect as it may be to have Waterfox partnering with an ad company (if I recall, Alex takes issue with that, saying that it’s a search syndicator, not an ad company), it’s better to partner with one whose business model hinges on privacy than one like Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc., that is based on spying. I certainly liked it better when WF partnered with Ecosia, but it’s kind of like Woody here before he went subscriber-supported only… he had ads from the big guys, not because he approved of their business practices, but because that was what he had to do to keep the site afloat at that time. It would be different if there was no choice, but just as Firefox’s default Google can be changed, so can Waterfox’s default of Bing. I don’t mind that Alex suggested using Bing. I’ve contributed to Waterfox (via “buy me a coffee”) too, though I would not use Bing with adblocking off. On the question of ‘support’: I give practical support to what I consider worth supporting by annually donating money to it, but in no other way. Same as the other two, it can be used in both Windows and Linux PCs as well as in Macs and I have it in all three. Of the first three mentioned, Waterfox has been the most satisfactory, so it is now, as it has been for quite a while now, the default one. ![]() I also have FF and Chrome (as well as poor old IE 11, no longer in use). I have “Waterfox” as my default browser in my Win 7 PC and in my newish Mac. I don’t expect such a deal, if it has been really made, to be announced in the front page of the “Wall Street Journal, or in any page of the WSJ for that matter, but looking around the Web in all the usual places dealing with “Tech” something more solid might pop up. It is a note from someone reporting some indirect evidence that, for all this person knows, such a deal might have taken place, but offering no hard evidence as the “smoking gun.” I am not sure what is the connection between this forum at “old.reditt”, where the note has been posted, and plain old “reddit” Because “plain old reddit” is not my first, or even my last source of information. To me, this is both interesting and a bit worrying, although it might not mean that much. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |