First off, yes, the title of the post is misleading. Mozilla is creating a privacy focused ad system. However, I legit don’t get who this is for.

As a user, I’m not turning off my adblockers. Yes, privacy is important. I’m ok with some ads, but I’m not going to risk my privacy and security, because it’s not like I’ll have a clue who is backing said ads. So it’s not for me.

Normal users have shown that they really don’t care, let alone have any kind of clue what’s going on. So it’s not for them.

Advertisers have huge incentive to show you targeted ads. They don’t want to show someone an ad on the other side of the planet for something they don’t have access to. Also why would they want to show you an ad for something completely unrelated. What’s the incentive for them to give up their targeted ads?

It’s not like Mozilla is poising themselves for any kind of government oversight. I’m in the US, and the US gov doesn’t seem to give a shit. And the EU, while they have GDPR and they’re fining companies left and right, it doesn’t seem like they’re really targeting these kinds of ads. Outside of those two I don’t know anything about other countries honestly.

So again, I have zero clue who this is for or why Mozilla thinks this will be successful. There’s no incentive or knowledge that this is needed.

I use Firefox. I run Linux. I’m not trying to bash Mozilla here. I’m not trying to be a naysayer. I’m just trying to understand what kind of real world use case this solves and incentivizes users and advertises to use it over the alternatives.