A privacy feature in Firefox is being used to track users without their consent, according to a privacy protection organisation. Mozilla has now been accused of breaching the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.
The complaint concerns a new feature in Firefox called ‘Privacy Preserving Attribution’ (PPA), which is supposed to help users protect their data by, among other things, ‘offering sites a non-invasive alternative’ to tracking. However, privacy advocacy group None of Your Business (Noyb) claims that the feature actually tracks users.
The organisation accuses Mozilla of having ‘taken a leaf out of Google’s playbook’, pointing out that the feature is added to the browser by default without asking users, and that, like Google’s ‘Privacy Sandbox’, it instead turns the browser into a tracking tool.
The idea of the tool, as described by Noyb, is that websites would have to ask Firefox to store information about people’s ad interactions in order to receive the aggregated information from multiple users, rather than placing traditional tracking cookies. While this is described as less invasive to users as the tracking is now done directly in Firefox, it is still a way to track users.
– 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, the organisation’s privacy counsel, in a press release.
Noyd has now notified Mozilla to the European Data Protection Authority to investigate the practice further, saying among other things that Mozilla should inform users more accurately and also delete any ‘unlawfully’ processed data.
– Users should be able to make a choice and the feature should have been turned off by default, says Mikolasch.
