"Privacy-Preserving" Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us yet Again
Mozilla introduced the "Privacy-Preserving Attribution" feature in Firefox 128 with Meta, enabling more tracking for advertisers. Users must manually opt out, sparking privacy and consent concerns. Critics view this as a departure from Mozilla's privacy mission, urging users to disable the feature or switch browsers.
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Mozilla has disappointed users by introducing a new feature called "Privacy-Preserving Attribution" (PPA) in Firefox 128, developed in collaboration with Meta. This feature, aimed at the advertising industry, adds to the tracking capabilities available to advertisers, despite Mozilla's claims of privacy protection. Users need to manually opt out of this experimental trial, raising concerns about consent and privacy. The implementation of PPA reflects a trend of browsers favoring the advertising industry over user interests. Mozilla's decision has sparked criticism for disregarding user consent and potentially compromising privacy. The Distributed Aggregation Protocol used by PPA raises privacy concerns as individual browser behavior is reported to a data aggregation server. Mozilla's move has been seen as a step away from its core mission of protecting user privacy, eroding trust among its user base. Users are advised to disable the PPA feature in Firefox settings and consider alternative browsers due to Mozilla's recent controversial decisions.
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13 commentsEvery time firefox pulls shit like this they piss off and alienate their users. What do they think is going to happen? If I were a Mozilla employee and my goal was to destroy firefox, this is exactly the sort of thing I'd be pushing for. I have no idea what firefox thinks it's doing, or if it's thinking about anything other than how to get more money from advertisers, but it shouldn't be hard see what exploiting users will lead to. Maybe they've already given up and their plan is to sell their users until they don't have any left.
Personally, I'll be exploring alternatives and forks and I'm looking to jump ship as soon as I can.
I updated my FF yesterday and at this point I make sure to check the settings for suddenly "opted-in" "features" I am not aware of. This one also was a big surprise.
If I want to get screwed and sold to the advertisement industry by my browser vendor, I'd simply use Chrome. So please stop it, Firefox.
To disable it on macOS: Safari > Preferences/Settings > Advanced > Uncheck "Allow privacy-preserving measurement of ad effectiveness"
To disable it on iOS: Settings > Safari > Advanced (scroll all the way down) > Turn off "Privacy Preserving Ad Measurement"
On the other hand: there is a ticket [1] asking for container-based-extensions, so something like Grammarly (aka the keylogger) could work only inside a container. It's been there for years, nothing changes. Seems like people are not interested in this kind of privacy stuff.
The good news: the CEO salary is really nice...
"Firefox added [ad tracking] and has already turned it on without asking you" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954535 - Jul 2024 (164 comments)
Ad-tech setting 'Privacy-Preserving Attribution' is opt-out in Firefox 128 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40952330 - Jul 2024 (185 comments)
I'm wondering if they are really surprised to have almost lost all of their market share when they go against their core values so easily...
The tldr that says it all:
One Mozilla developer claimed that explaining PPA would be too challenging, so they had to opt users in by default.
The way it works is that individual browsers report their behavior to a data aggregation server (operated by Mozilla), then that server reports the aggregated data to an advertiser's server. The "advertising network" only receives aggregated data with differential privacy, but the aggregation server still knows the behavior of individual browsers!In particular saying you’re sending your activity to Mozilla is not accurate: you’re sending the output of a postcomputation step that makes it cryptographically infeasible for Mozilla to see your activity.
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