In response to the introduction of PPA: Why I cancelled my Mozilla VPN subscription and why you should too

With Mozilla buying an AdTech Company and building tracking directly into their browser (“Privacy-Preserving” Attribution, sure…), the future of Mozilla seems clear: Yet again they fail to understand who their userbase is and sellout the data of the little userbase they still have for the short time money. That Mozilla does not understand, that 2,83% market share in the browser userbase means that those 2,83% probably care about their privacy is beyond me.

Anyhow: I was a happy Mozilla VPN customer as Mozilla VPN is neither the most feature rich VPN on the market nor the cheapest but fulfilled my needs and as a nice sideeffect I could support Mozilla through my subscription. As I read the news of PPA introduction I came to the conclusion that it makes no sense anymore to pay for a VPN subscription that is more expensive and has less features than the competition if the company that runs the VPN does not care about my privacy.

So I invite you to join me in sending a message to Mozilla: If you don’t care about our privacy there is literally no reason for you to exist: Neither as a VPN provider nor as a browser company.

Did you even like, read any of what the functionality of PPA is and it’s actual purpose or did you read a headline/post title and proceed to throw a hissy fit without doing any basic research?

It kinda astounds me that you clearly haven’t at all, part of the point of PPA is that it explicitly DOESN’T “sell” specific user data.

Sure, go to nord von much better. I love how uninformed people are mad about a feature that they can disable and bc they are mad they post saying that they are moving to objectively worse options

How many more uninformed posts do we did on this? My only criticism is Mozilla shouldn’t have made it opt-in. There should have been a pop-on on first start after the update explaining it and to give the option to enable it.

My suggestion is to set this feature as default off, but provide a prompt to turn it on after updates/new installations (and explain and mobilize users to participate in what Mozilla calls the “struggle” in the prompt).
Perhaps it would be much better this way.

Why do many Firefox uses dislike PPA

I understand that some of you may not want to have even ounce of data being collected about you but everybody should consider that we aren’t entitled to free content from anyone,Mozilla is developing rather privacy friendly ways to help advertisers,if they hadn’t Advertisers would be incentivized to completely drop support for Firefox ,use different more invasive methods to monetize or even worse paywall their platforms.whether we like it or not Advertising keeps internet alive,if you want to downvote bomb this at least provide sufficient alternatives to PPA that monetize more ethically or stop relying on paid/monetization-dependent services altogether.

Mozilla VPN is just a white label version of Mullvad (which, to its credit, is a good VPN service that I use myself). Mozilla took your data and money, turned around, and bought a subscription on your behalf.

Considering Mozilla did the same thing with Monitor Plus, and ended up sending your data to OneRep (a mistake so terrible that they ended up severing the relationship), I think it’s safe to no longer trust Mozilla with any extra data at this point.

2 months later, and this post ended up being much more justified.

I don’t care if PPA doesn’t sell *specific* user data.

I don’t want to help advertisers in any way, and PPA is about helping them know if their ad campaigns are effective or not.

So PPA is disabled for me.

There are several issues I have with PPA and Mozillas justifications for building it in:

  1. “Anonymized” user data is still user data. That data also was not collected nor sold before.

  2. Real anonymization is not an easy task, as multiple privacy researchers have pointed out. This is especially problamatic in combination with the following:

  3. PPA is not privacy-by-design, data is collected and than anonymized. This leaves the door open for future changes to the way data is used. Also right now it’s in beta so bugs also with anonymization are to be expected.

  4. Mozilla took a big and loud stand against Googles Plans with Manifest v3. However small the PPA changes are, they are a first step in watering down their position.

  5. What is the real incentive here for Mozilla? There is no reason for them to build tracking into their browser if they do not plan on selling this data to ad companies. And if there is a way to make more money by collecting more data, guess what will happen.

However: I did not and at this point to not plan on stopping to use Firefox (and I did not say that). I just came to the conclusion that there is no incentive for me to give money to Mozilla and that stopping to do that could be a way to send a message to management.

That is just my opinion and you do not have to share it. But please be not so naive to think that selling data is not the point of PPA. As I said before this is not a fix for a problem that existed before. This data was not collected before. So collecting and selling it however you turn it is not a solution it is a problem.

better go to mullvad… after all mozilla vpn is just a repackaging of mullvad

See my response to the comment above

I’m sorry if you misread my post as I rant, I am pretty calm actually, just voiced my opinion as you do in online forums, have a nice day :victory_hand:

wow I did not know that is what they are doing. How did you find out about this? lol