Secure Environment: Data sets are matched in a highly secure environment, ensuring advertisers, publishers, and Anonym don’t access any user level data.
Anonym’s solution processes data from multiple parties in confidential computing environments. The anonymized outputs are used by ad platforms to create audiences and optimize ad campaigns.
How I read this: “we take all your non-anonymized data, analyze it, and spit out anonymized buckets; but we totally pinky swear to never ever look at the data, only our algorithm will”
Potentially probably worse than the oft-ridiculed Google Privacy Sandbox
Maybe it’s based on the (not good) Intel SGX or something, that’s what “confidential computing environments” sounds like to me. Hope I’m wrong about all this though.
My controversial take is that I would prefer Mozilla following Brave’s path and having a successful ad business, than them closing or becoming too reliant on Google search money.
As another commenter earlier pointed out, they wouldnt need to rely on Google’s money if they stopped paying their C-suite employees million-dollar salaries.
I own a nonprofit and it’s insane to me how a nonprofit can give all that donated money to its employees instead of investing it back into building great products and services for the people who gave them the donations to begin with.
I stopped my donations to Mozilla and Gnome.
Mozilla because I don´t want my hard earned money going into the pocket of a CEO who is almost not caring about the products I donate for.
And Gnome, because of their lack of transparency about the Copyright law suite.
All company CEOs are paid huge sums, so how will you find a good CEO to operate this huge organisation? Btw, Mozilla corporation and foundation are separate entities, so your donations do not go to the pocket of their CEO.
I do think that ads aren’t going away on the internet any time soon, so if Mozilla can make a better paradigm for them it would be good. At the same time, I am worried that this will hurt user privacy.
I think that ultimately, this is the outcome of the cutthroat internet business. Mozilla inc seems to be desperate to not be making massive losses (hence the litany of new products) [not to absolve them of responsibility if this new venture is harmful]. But in the current state of the internet and browser business, it seems that only amoral strategies have a chance at succeeding. I hope Mozilla doesn’t sacrifice their values in the search of profits.
There are plenty of CEOs or talented people who can lead companies that don’t need a multi-million dollar salary. I’d bet even if they started looking at the people already working for Mozilla, somebody is capable and willing.
Last time I checked, Mozilla Corporation is the parent company of Mozilla Foundation. It’s very naive to think that nonprofits and their parent corporations don’t co-mingle or borrow funding from one another. I’m not sure where you live, but living in such a capitalistic country like US, I see companies do this all the time. So yeah, the donations made to Mozilla do go to their CEOs in some way or another.
This gets said a lot, but the development budget alone is ~220 million dollars a year and that excludes all non-development related costs of running a medium-large organization which does a lot more than just develop Firefox. The search partnership brings in >400 million a year. (details)
I doubt donations could realistically even cover 10% of the development cost on a good year, And that is just the cost of development, none of the other associated costs of running a medium-large tech organization which does a lot more than just develop Firefox.
As a point of comparison, Signal–a much smaller project–has ~50 million in annual expenses (roughly 12% of Mozilla’s expenses) and a staff of 50 (so only about 7% the size of Mozilla).
I don´t want my hard earned money going into the pocket of a CEO
Just to be clear, your money can’t go into the pocket of the CEO, because you can’t donate to Mozilla Corp (this also means you can’t make donations to directly fund Firefox). Mozilla corporation is self-sustaining, and revenue positive, and because of its structure, any profit must be reinvested unlike with typical for profit companies.
When you donate, you are donating to Mozilla foundation, and your money goes to funding their non-profit and charitable programs, advocacy and activism, research, scholarships, fellowships, and grants, and so forth. These are donations in the traditional charitable sense (donating to something you think makes society a little better), not a crowdfunding source for Firefox.
You’ve got that backwards. The corporation is fully owned by and subordinate to the non profit. From your link:
The Mozilla Corporation was established in August 2005 as a wholly owned taxable subsidiary that serves the non-profit, public benefit goals of its parent, the Mozilla Foundation, and the vast Mozilla community.
I don’t know. Of all projects, I think Firefox has a chance. Thunderbird gets in the range of 10 million a year in donations and it’s an email client. An email client many people haven’t even heard of. Most people have heard of Firefox.
Maybe not 200 million, but I think they could get 100 million in donations. I’d donate if it actually meant anything.
