Mozilla Faces Privacy Complaint for Enabling Tracking in Firefox Without User Consent
upstart writes:
Mozilla Faces Privacy Complaint for Enabling Tracking in Firefox Without User Consent:
Vienna-based privacy non-profit noyb (short for None Of Your Business) has filed a complaint with the Austrian data protection authority (DPA) against Firefox maker Mozilla for enabling a new feature called Privacy-Preserving Attribution (PPA) without explicitly seeking users' consent.
"Contrary to its reassuring name, this technology allows Firefox to track user behavior on websites," noyb said. "In essence, the browser is now controlling the tracking, rather than individual websites."
Noyb also called out Mozilla for allegedly taking a leaf out of Google's playbook by "secretly" enabling the feature by default without informing users.
PPA, which is currently enabled in Firefox version 128 as an experimental feature, has its parallels in Google's Privacy Sandbox project in Chrome.
The initiative, now abandoned by Google, sought to replace third-party tracking cookies with a set of APIs baked into the web browser that advertisers can talk to in order to determine users' interests and serve targeted ads.
Put differently, the web browser acts as a middleman that stores information about the different categories that users can be slotted into based on their internet browsing patterns.
PPA, per Mozilla, is a way for sites to "understand how their ads perform without collecting data about individual people," describing it as a "non-invasive alternative to cross-site tracking."
It's also similar to Apple's Privacy Preserving Ad Click Attribution, which allows advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their ad campaigns on the web without compromising on user privacy.
The way PPA works is as follows: Websites that serve ads can ask Firefox to remember the ads in the form of an impression that includes details about the ads themselves, such as the destination website.
If a Firefox user ends up visiting the destination website and performs an action that's deemed valuable by the business - e.g., making an online purchase by clicking on the ad, also called "conversion" - that website can prompt the browser to generate a report.
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