Acceptable Ads is bullshit on many levels:

• It’s made by an ad company
• The same ad company runs multiple popular ad blockers (including AdBlock Plus)
• There are no standards on privacy invasion

uBlock Origin, or at least uBlock Origin Lite on Chromium-like browsers, are must-haves.

The best browser you can set up for a family member, IMO, is Firefox. Disable Telemetry (which should rid them of Mozilla’s own ad scheme too), install uBlock Origin, remind them to never call or trust any other tech support people who reach out to them, and maybe walk them through some scam baiting videos.

I’m still evaluating which Chrome-likes are best at actual ad blocking, and the landscape is grim.

You’re 100% right about Brave being scummy.

And I hope my point didn’t come across as a defensd of Brave, but rather, “how is it that Mozilla is doing this thing in a worse way than a company that is infamously disreputable?”

I think that’s the point: Google has been shutting down Manifest V2 extensions one step at a time, and it’s been experimenting with anti-ad-block tech on YouTube with one user group at a time.

You haven’t heard about the Brave ads that let you slowly accumulate tokens that you can then use to tip creators or websites? I’m not saying it was a good plan, or an ethical plan, but it was… You know, something.

Unlike what Mozilla did, Brave didn’t enable this by default, but they heavily marketed it as a feature.

If Mozilla implemented some kind of tipping system, that could be interesting. Apparently, such a system already could exist under GNU Taler too.

Would you look at that, privacy preserving advertisement!

Let’s take it one step further and go really crazy with a/b testing

<a href="company_url/campaign1"><img src="funny_picture.gif"></a>

<a href="company_url/campaign2"><img src="different_picture.gif"></a>

If we take “unlimited unauthenticated API access shouldn’t be possible” for granted, I’m unfortunately not all that technically competent about what can be done next.

The first thing that comes to mind is treating website access and app access differently, maybe limiting app API access by default for people who haven’t logged in.

Or creating a separate bot API that’s rolled out across all servers at some point in the future… And I know federation could pose some serious chokepoints here so that’s where my speculation ends.

I have a few suggestions for development concerns off the top of my head:

• Scrub post metadata* after users request its deletion
• Auto-purge deleted content* rather than letting it sit behind a “deleted” flag (something Facebook got a ton of flak for doing)
• Auto-purge deleted media*
• Consider seriously limiting opening data wide for scraping, since the problem is non-consensual scraping, not payment for non-consensual scraping

* either immediately or, to prevent spam, after some time

…And attitudes like this towards privacy will keep Lemmy from progressing to a point where those issues will be fixed.

I have a fundamental problem with giant corporations scraping user data without user consent. That’s a system-level issue. It doesn’t become “good” just because they get to scrape without consent for free.

Lemmy has quite a few unfortunately invasive qualities of its own, including generally needing an email address from you (Reddit does not), having poor privacy and data retention practices, and generally being very messy with who gets to decide what happens with your data and how easily it can be scraped.

Sure, Reddit sells it… But Lemmy gives it to any web scraper for free.

To paraphrase Louis Rossman, he doesn’t need the fraction of a penny he’d get from you wasting your time, and if YouTube wants your money then they should earn it.

Live streams will stutter badly when a game is going on, something I have experienced in Firefox but not Chrome.

And of course Chromium has billions of dollars at its disposal while Mozilla can’t even accept donations from users for Firefox so it’s not exactly surprising that the browser with worse funding and management doesn’t run as well.

What’s the best browser to recommend to people who want to dump Brave but either can’t or won’t switch to Firefox, due to things like unoptimal behavior of sites like YouTube while playing games, for example?

The best I’ve come up with is Thorium, a de-Googled Chromium fork, optimized for speed.

You’ve got two options:

• Fight back with ad blockers. Tubular or ReVanced on Android, uBlock Origin on PCs.
• Pay up. (This is the unethical option.)

If I need to fudge info, I tend to put it into a password database’s “notes” field for easier note-keeping, FWIW.

Not a full-on identity, but bits of info like stated name, address, etc.

For now, I’ll take requests… But the tool is running on a potato.

Extremely intended! They built a model to lie and a surrogate model to say the first model was being truthful.

They called it LaundryML.

Considering the news about OneRep… Definitely steer clear of Mozilla’s scrubbing service.

OneRep is what Mozilla uses to remove your data from the internet, if you pay them for Monitor Plus.

Didn’t somebody make a biased AI and a laundering AI to say it wasn’t biased, just to demonstrate how easy it was to do?

I’ve been working on something that can be used to manually identity mass downvoters and downvotees. It doesn’t happen as much as I’d expected, but there are some humorous exceptions I’ve been able to pull with my limited research.

JLDC(@)lemmy(.)byrdcrouse(.)com, for example, has downvoted someone else at least 15,000 times.

One of their favorite targets is Viking_Hippie(@)lemmy(.)world, who had accrued over 1,000 downvotes from them alone.

Linkerbaan(@)lemmy(.)world has received over 10,000 downvotes, including over 1,000 from AlmightySnoo(@)lemmy(.)world.

BTW, I checked both you and OP out. No mass downvotes that I could see, although my data set is incomplete.