I think they believe it's not anti-privacy, but a lesser of two evils.

Mozilla/Firefox simply can't exist without ads. Google same thing. So why would they actively contribute to their own demise by declaring war on ads?

Instead they chose a compromise that still allows ads but in a more responsible/private way. And you can still turn it off. Sure it should have been opt-in, but I think most people wouldn't use it then and we're back to the same problems.

But it's a privacy feature? 🤷

I mean sure, it's easy to read this and go immediate full-on "someone suggested another distroy than arch"-nuclear. But as someone else said, and what is essentially the linked post, this is a feature for those that do not run adblockers.

If you run an adblocker, this feature does nothing for you. Whether on or off. It could not matter any less. You don't interact with ads, so there is no ad interaction to track.

But if you don't run an adblocker - and let's be real here, that's going to be the vast majority of even Firefox users probably - then this is how advertising ought to work, so it's a privacy-enhancing feature. Yes, right now it doesn't do much. But were it opt-in, it could not do much. Not now, not ever.

Tell me, what data does an advertiser know about me if I have enabled this feature? You can assume that I don't run any tracking protection, no ad blocker, and all telemetry enabled.