Oh Dear!…Firefox Not Playing The Game?

Advertisers Angry with Mozilla

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is not happy with the open source browser Mozilla’s anti-tracking features. Although it is perfectly normal that Internet users are concerned about companies spying on them, the outfit has been attacking Mozilla on the grounds that it insisted on defending the people’s rights to control the use of cookies on their systems.
Apparently, if your browser refuses to hand over all your personal information to advertisers then there must be something wrong with it. The Interactive Advertising Bureau is a trade organization representing marketing and advertising companies across the US and Europe. After the outfit received much abuse for its stand, one would have expected advertisers to have given up and waited for the dust to settle on this privacy debate.

However, the IAB placed a full-page advert in Advertising Age calling for users to stop Mozilla from hijacking the Internet. The ad insists that you can only find what you want online with the help of advertising cookies. The outfit believes that Mozilla is going to eliminate the same cookies which enable advertisers to reach the proper audience, with the proper message, at the proper time.

In fact, Mozilla lets users control cookies and stop them from websites they haven't actually visited being dumped on the system. Instead of eliminating cookies, the browser is providing users control over annoying advertisements for stuff they don’t want. However, the IAB claims what Mozilla is doing isn’t in the interest of privacy but rather about helping some business models gain a marketplace advantage and reducing competition.

And this is said about Mozilla and its open source coders, dedicated to overthrowing the man with free coding. It is hard to believe that Mozilla is helping someone play monopoly, because the whole point of Mozilla was to kill off a Microsoft monopoly. The Interactive Advertising Bureau claims that Internet users already have control over whether they receive interest-based adverts through the Digital Advertising Alliance’s self-regulatory program, which is something new, as the program in question appears to be designed to promote better advertising rather than helping users out.

Apparently, this is just a huge PR own goal of the kind which is usually only tried by the entertainment industry against pirates, while the users might want to download Firefox and disable all cookies after reading the ad.