The Mozilla Foundation announced it is currently planning to release Firefox 60 which will suggest sponsored content to the users in the US. The Foundation has acquired a content system called “Pocket” which was a form article management system formerly known as “Read It Later”. Mozilla has been testing it in the Firefox nightly build currently and the changes will then be rolled out to the stable build. The company also said in a blog post that it won’t share any data with the advertisers so that the users privacy won’t be sacrificed.
“All personalization happens on the client-side, without needing to vacuum up all of your personal data or sharing it with others,” Nate Weiner said.
Mozilla is also providing an option to disable the sponsored content to the users. The browsers won’t send the data like age, gender, location etc but it will send the users impressions and clicks.
To turn off the sponsored content the users can just click on the cog wheel icon in the upper right corner of the Firefox 60 New Tab and uncheck the option that shows “Show Sponsored Stories”.
Mozilla said that showing sponsored content is good because it will promote the open web by allowing websites to make money without relying on the users personal data furthermore it will generate a new revenue stream for blogs without relying on Google Adsense.
“We’ve come to accept a premise around advertising today that users need to trade their privacy and data in exchange for personalized, high quality experiences,” wrote Pocket co-founder Nate Weiner. “Our experiments over the last few months have proved that this isn’t true.”
Mozilla thinks that you won’t mind this because all the analytics is done on the client side and personal information is never requested or sent to the corporations. Even if the websites collected the technical interaction data it won’t be able to target the specific customers.
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