Mozilla has acquired Anonym, a trailblazer in privacy-preserving digital advertising. This strategic acquisition enables Mozilla to help raise the bar for the advertising industry by ensuring user privacy while delivering effective advertising solutions.

About Anonym: Anonym was founded in 2022 by former Meta executives Brad Smallwood and Graham Mudd. The company was backed by Griffin Gaming Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Heracles Capital as well as a number of strategic individual investors.

  • Vincent
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    10 days ago

    As I understand it, the way it works is that the aggregate categories are defined beforehand, e.g. "these sites are part of the “animals” category. So then if you visit any of those sites, your local install will match them against that list, and then share the aggregation outcome (i.e. “you visited an ‘animals’ site”), without having to share the specific site you viewed - which thus Mozilla can’t even know.

    • kbal@fedia.io
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      10 days ago

      Right, no doubt it’s something like that. So in short it’s sending information about your web browsing habits to Mozilla so that they can better inform their advertisers of who they’ll be reaching with their sponsored url bar suggestions.

      Sometimes I forget that there are people who would have no problem with that. But after all, billions of people are happy to use Chrome.

      • Vincent
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        9 days ago

        Yeah, and the main difference to me is that that’s not going to sway elections or disclose a journalist’s sources or expose a human rights activist or something like that.