Mozilla hit with privacy complaint in EU over Firefox tracking tech

Mozilla is a non -profit organization that develops Firefox -webbrowser. It is unusual to see a complaint about privacy against Mozill. However noyb has taken issue with a new feature Mozilla recently deployed in Firefox that it argues turns the Firefox browser “into a tracking tool for websites”.

Mozilla calls the feature at issue “Privacy Preserving Attribution” (PPA). But Naib believes this is misleading. If the EU's privacy watchdog accepts the complaint, the Firefox maker could be forced to change its strategy or even face fines (GDPR allows fines of up to 4% of global revenue). “Contrary to its reassuring name, this technology allows Firefox to track user behaviour on websites,” noyb wrote in a press release. 

“In essence, the browser is now controlling the tracking, rather than individual websites. While this may be an improvement over more intrusive cookie tracking, the company never asks users if they want to enable it. Instead, Mozilla decided to turn it on by default after people installed the latest software update. This is particularly troubling because Mozilla is generally known for its privacy-preserving alternatives when most other browsers are based on Google Chromium.

The attempt to move from cookie-based web user tracking to browser-level tracking will be familiar to anyone who has followed Google's so-called "privacy sandbox" proposal. This is a multi-year effort to end support for tracking cookies in Google Chrome in favor of a range of alternative ad targeting technologies based on assigning browser users to interest groups. Google's attempt to shift its ad tech stack away from cookie tracking has been stymied and stuck in slow motion by scrutiny from UK regulators, but one tangible effect, according to Naib, is that it appears to have inspired Mozilla to choose the browser level. tracking.

"Like Google's (failed) Privacy Sandbox, it turns the browser into a website tracking tool," noyb writes, adding: "While it may be less intrusive than unlimited [cookie-based] tracking in Small, it's still the industry norm. .

Another part of noyb's objection is that Mozilla's move doesn't "replace cookies"  Firefox just doesn't have the market share and the ability to change industry practices  so all it does is give websites another way to target their ads. Noobs' defense lawyer Felix Mikolasch said in a statement: "Mozilla has just accepted a narrative saying that the advertising industry has the right to track users by transforming the Firefox for AD measuring tool to extend the cookie and other tracking tools. This is just a new, additional way to track users.

The complaint, supported by noyb and filed with the Austrian data protection authority, accuses Mozilla of failing to inform users about the processing of their personal data and using an opt-out mechanism (instead of an active "opt-in").

Privacy groups also want regulators to order the deletion of all data collected so far. While Firefox users can opt out of tracking, they must take active steps to find and enable the setting, which Noyb says is hidden in a submenu. "It's a shame that organizations like Mozilla think users are too stupid to say yes or no," Mikolas added. "Users must be able to make a choice and this feature must be closed by default."

Mozilla Mozilla's own site. He also suggested that it aims to improve the efforts of "invasive advertising practice" by providing technical replacement plans and further claiming that the feature is "easy to disable" in the setting of Firefox. "The PPA allows advertisers to measure overall advertising effectiveness without collecting information that identifies specific individuals," he wrote. 

“Instead of collecting private information to determine when consumers interact with ads, PPA is built using encryption technology to provide privacy-preserving aggregated attribution. These technologies were prevented by all political parties, including Mozilla, to identify individuals or their browsing activities. " Hilton added that Mozilla welcomes opportunities to interact with the community of her users and regulatory agencies.

At the end of August, a blog post published in Mozilla wrote that she was worried about the movement of some jurisdictions to prevent the movement of the browser's reverse tracking function, adding that "the privacy of the user is resolved by a mix of technology and regulatory threats". Stimulate the development of technology. A complicated part of Mozilla's narrative (not mentioned in this article) is that Google itself remains its main source of revenue, thanks to a long-term search deal in which Google pays the maker of Firefox to add its name to searches. The program is set to the default settings of competing browsers.