Mozilla is the latest company to run into trouble with the EU. Austrian legal group Noyb filed a complaint against Mozilla for setting the Privacy Preserving Attribution (PPA) feature to default without informing its users. Noyb says this situation affects millions of Europeans.
According to Mozilla, the PPA includes websites that ask Firefox to remember the ads that show them and generate a report of interest. Firefox creates the data but then sends it to the aggregation service, where the report is aggregated with similar ones. The company says that individual browsing activity is not shared with any third parties, making it a safe system.
Noyb’s complaint says that this still interferes with EU users’ rights guaranteed by the GDPR – while considering widespread “routine” tracking in the US. “Mozilla has just bought into the argument that the advertising industry has the right to track users by turning Firefox into an ad measurement tool,” said Felix Mikolasch, data protection lawyer at Noyb, in a statement. “While Mozilla may have good intentions, it is unlikely that the ‘privacy feature’ will replace cookies and other tracking tools. It is simply a new, additional way to track users.” Users who want to disable the PPA should navigate to the browser settings and click exit from the submenu.
The complaint concludes with Noyb requesting that Austrian data protection authorities investigate Mozilla’s privacy settings. It also says that Mozilla must warn users about its data processing measures, implement a logging system and remove “unlawfully” processed data. Noyb has previously filed complaints against technology companies such as Microsoft, Meta and OpenAI.
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