Thread · 9 tweets · 25 Feb 2022

@mikarv is correct that replicating unjust asymmetries of information with or without seeing personal data is the same problem, and that privacy is not confidentiality. These need to be kept in mind as critical tools as we progress. However, this piece is imperfect.

First, presenting the Facebook/Mozilla collaboration as necessarily motivated by greed or weakness is just wrong. Standards have a tradition of cooperation and of excellent work produced by entities one may otherwise strongly disagree with. Absent evidence, this is just cynicism.

Second, the piece does not engage with the trust model discussion. On-device and O&O servers are known issues, acknowledged widely, and with proposals on the table (eg. darobin.github.io/garuda/). It's unsolved but an area of ongoing development that can't usefully be ignored.

Lastly, indeed privacy isn't confidentiality! It's the set of rules about how information can be used when it is about people or impacts people. Deciding what those rules should be is exactly what we need to be doing - and the process is open to all who contribute in good faith.

For many of us, it's a bit of an adjustment. Over the past two decades, we've had no say as to how our privacy works. After these rules are set, they will be harder to change. If you have ideas and opinions, it's over there and it's now: patcg.github.io.

Everyone loves to hate advertising, but like sewers it's key infrastructure and worth fixing. (It turns out that sewers are also a lot more interesting than most realise.)

I'll add that "just do contextual" isn't a well-defined position. With attribution? View-through? Viewability? Frequency capping? Fraud prevention? And the deeper into details one goes, the more such questions need to be decided - for us all.

I'd like ads privacy questions to be answered with major contributions from critical tech experts who can hold the process to account. That's why shaming Mozilla for stepping up is a problem: I don't want others to be pre-emptively shamed into silence.

(And with this, I'll be offline for a flight over the next 9 hours or so, so you should all feel free to yell at me 😁)