by Ravie Lakshmanan at The Hacker News
Vienna-based privacy non-profit noyb (short for None Of Your Business) has filed a complaint with the Austrian data protection authority (DPA) against Firefox maker Mozilla for enabling a new feature called Privacy-Preserving Attribution (PPA) without explicitly seeking users’ consent.
“Contrary to its reassuring name, this technology allows Firefox to track user behavior on websites,” noyb said. “In essence, the browser is now controlling the tracking, rather than individual websites.”
Noyb also called out Mozilla for allegedly taking a leaf out of Google’s playbook by “secretly” enabling the feature by default without informing users.
PPA, which is currently enabled in Firefox version 128 as an experimental feature, has its parallels in Google’s Privacy Sandbox project in Chrome.
The initiative, now abandoned by Google, sought to replace third-party tracking cookies with a set of APIs baked into the web browser that advertisers can talk to in order to determine users’ interests and serve targeted ads.
Put differently,…
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