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We designed Suggested Tiles to respect user privacy. Instead of centrally collecting as much data about as many people as possible (the strategy of all other ad-tech companies), we distribute all possible ads to all users and let Firefox decide what to show. This prevents your data "leaking", while showing you relevant advertising that you can control.

The user interface is designed to help you understand why you are seeing the ad, and to allow you to easily and permanently disable this type of advertising from your experience.

Our goal is to provide effective, relevant advertising without sacrificing user privacy.

For those interested in the transparency of this, all of the server-side software for this is on github:

https://github.com/mozilla/splice https://github.com/mozilla/onyx https://github.com/mozilla/infernyx

And tracked openly on Bugzilla:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?product=Content%20S...

Why does this exist in the first place? How do you justify showing ads?
It is true that one of the motivations is to diversify our revenue stream; almost all of our revenue comes from our Search (advertising) deal with Yahoo.

The real reason we are doing it is because modern digital advertising sucks, and we are going to change how it works.

The current ad-tech 'environment' invades your privacy, robs publishers, and delivers deplorable performance for the brand. The only winner right now is the middle-men; the 'programmatic' exchanges and the various money siphons that trade your personal data.

We want to fix that. We are starting by building an ad targeting mechanism in the browser that you can easily control and that doesn't leak your data. Currently, ads will be shown only on the Newtab page, though one could imagine a generalized future version of this capability opened up to all internet publishers.

How can I turn it off? This is completely off-putting and frankly, to me, no better than the nonsense amazon referral stuff in the Unity lens.