Facepalm: The latest release of the Firefox web browser brought a new feature designed to please both privacy-conscious users and advertisers. However, it is bound to do the opposite, pinning one more controversy onto Mozilla's stated mission to take back the web from Big Tech.
Mozilla released Firefox 128 a week ago, introducing some improvements for local text translation, UI, DNS proxies, and more. The list of changes for the new browser also includes a note about Privacy Preserving Attribution (PPA), an experimental API designed to provide an alternative to user tracking for ad attribution. Now, Mozilla has given a longer explanation regarding PPA's uses, but many users are unhappy with the new feature.
Privacy Preserving Attribution is enabled by default, starting with Firefox 128. Mozilla explained that the prototype technology is to help build a new standard for advertising on the web. The API would assist website developers in understanding ad performance without collecting data on individuals. It's a non-invasive alternative to cookie-based cross-site tracking, a much-maligned practice that Firefox and other non-Chrome browsers have been blocking for years.
Mozilla modeled PPA on "impressions" stored by Firefox every time a website shows visitors advertising banners. The browser can then create a report based on those impressions, and a website can retrieve the information directly from Firefox. Everything is encrypted, anonymized, and stored on the local device. The compromise gives advertisers what they want (a report about successful ad campaigns, e-commerce trends, etc.), and users have their privacy protected.
"This approach has a lot of advantages over legacy attribution methods, which involve many companies learning a lot about what you do online," Mozilla stated.
Coincidentally (or not), this is almost the same excuse Google made for its ambitious Privacy Sandbox initiative. The search giant still makes most of its money on advertising but wants to eventually deprecate third-party cookies used for cross-site tracking in Chrome and most Chromium-based browsers.
However, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and other experts say Privacy Sandbox is still an advertising-tracking technology. The EFF points out that the solution serves advertisers' needs first and foremost and has nothing to do with actual privacy on the web.
Mozilla's PPA experiment currently works with just a large handful of websites for testing. However, the company wants to eventually turn the API into a proper web standard that third-party browsers or even Google can use.
Although users can easily disable PPA in Firefox settings, many people criticized the feature as another pro-advertising and tracking solution in disguise. Firefox should let users opt-in to the feature instead of enabling it by default.
Mozilla introduces experimental API in Firefox to help advertisers without tracking users
