Due to its past status as a bastion of user and privacy-respecting free and open-source technology, Firefox (Mozilla) veering off in the opposite direction (or being perceived as such) always causes a commotion.
The latest controversy is building around a feature known as “Privacy-preserving attribution” (PPA), which is trialed as a prototype in the browser’s version 128.
The very name sounds like a PR spin, given that PPA has everything to do with advertising, specifically, providing advertisers with Firefox users’ interaction data – although the privacy angle is supposed to be that this data is “anonymized.”
Related: How “anonymized” data is a myth
This, coupled with the fact that Firefox has been working on this with none other than Meta, inevitably provoked a backlash. Still, Firefox CTO Bobby Holley took to Reddit to defend the feature with a lot of big ideas and promises.
The gist of the argument presented by Holley is that Firefox is out to produce an “industry-wide privacy-preserving mechanism” and that this will somehow continue to line ad industry’s pockets and protect user privacy.
As to why users might have thought differently when PPA was announced, Holley blamed “insufficient communication” from Mozilla.
The Reddit post goes into how the internet is now “a massive web of surveillance,” and that Firefox’s previous idea for how to do something about it – namely, anti-tracking features – is lacking.
The reason is that advertisers can find ways to bypass them, and, it “only helps the people that choose to use Firefox” (and that’s at this point a small number of people in the overall browser market share).
So, Holley is suggesting that Firefox is not only hell-bent on protecting people’s privacy but also generous toward everyone – hence the ambition of creating an “industry-wide mechanism.”
The Firefox CTO claims that PPA is basically an alternative to collecting “a bunch of personal data,” while still allowing advertisers to keep making a bunch of money.
And – “We’ve been collaborating with Meta on this, because any successful mechanism will need to be actually useful to advertisers, and designing something that Mozilla and Meta are simultaneously happy with is a good indicator we’ve hit the mark.”
But working with Meta, notorious for its unscrupulous personal data collection policies, and making this software that’s baked in as “opt-out,” as well as the general slippery-slope nature of such schemes, continues to rub users the wrong way.
Says Holley: “The prototype is temporary, restricted to a handful of test sites, and only works in Firefox. (…) It’s about measurement (aggregate counts of impressions and conversions) rather than targeting.”
And you can disable it by unchecking the option under “Website Advertising Preferences” in the settings “Privacy & Security.”
