Mozilla Hit With Privacy Complaint Alleging Firefox Tracks It Users
A nonprofit digital privacy group called NOYB, short for None Of Your Business, has formally issued a complaint against Mozilla with the Austrian data protection authority (DSB), urging it to investigate the browser maker's "Privacy Preserving Attribution" (PPA) feature in Firefox. According to NOYB, this feature is at odds with its reassuring name by tracking Firefox users without their consent.
NOBY likens PPA to the Privacy Sandbox feature that Google once pushed and later abandoned in Chrome, saying it turns the browser itself into a tracking tool for websites. Rather than using cookies in the traditional sense, websites essentially ask Firefox to store information about a user's interactions with ads, and that information gets bundled with other users to be periodically sent to a website as an aggregate summary of results.
"PPA does not involve sending information about your browsing activities to anyone. This includes Mozilla and our DAP partner (ISRG). Advertisers only receive aggregate information that answers basic questions about the effectiveness of their advertising," Mozilla explains in a blog post.
NOYB does concede that this method "might be an improvement compared to even more invasive cooking tracking," but it takes umbrage with the latest version of Firefox enabling the feature without explicitly asking users for permission. The privacy watchdog calls it "particularly worrying" given Mozilla's generally positive reputation when it comes to these sort of things.
The watchdog also alleges that PPA runs afoul of the European Union's GDPR rules, saying that while it doesn't replace cookies, it is an alternative or additional way for websites to target advertising.
"Mozilla has just bought into the narrative that the advertising industry has a right to track users by turning Firefox into an ad measurement tool. While Mozilla may have had good intentions, it is very unlikely that 'privacy preserving attribution' will replace cookies and other tracking tools. It is just a new, additional means of tracking users," said Felix Mikolasch, data protection lawyer at NOYB.
Mikolasch went further with the criticism levied at the Firefox developer, saying, "It's a shame that an organization like Mozilla believes users are too dumb to say yes or no. Users should be able to make a choice and the feature should have been turned off by default."
It should be noted that PPA is a limited test at the moment, with a "small number of sites" participating. Nevertheless, NOYB is urging the DSB to investigate and to force Mozilla to make it it an opt-in system.
