STOCKHOLM, Sept 25 (Reuters) - Vienna-based advocacy group NOYB on Wednesday said it has filed a complaint with the Austrian data protection authority against Mozilla accusing the Firefox browser maker of tracking user behaviour on websites without consent.
NOYB (None Of Your Business), the digital rights group founded by privacy activist Max Schrems, said Mozilla has enabled a so-called “privacy preserving attribution” feature that turned the browser into a tracking tool for websites without directly telling its users.
Mozilla had defended the feature, saying it wanted to help websites understand how their ads perform without collecting data about individual people. By offering what it called a non-invasive alternative to cross-site tracking, it hoped to significantly reduce collecting individual information.
As a user, ‘privacy preserving attribution’ is unappealing for a few reasons.
It seems it would overwhelmingly benefit a type of website that I think is toxic for the internet as a whole - AI generated pages SEO’d to the gills that are designed exclusively as advertisement delivery instruments.
It’s a tool that quantitatively aids in the refinement of clickbait, which I believe is an unethical abuse of human psychology.
Those issues notwithstanding, it’s unrealistic to assume that PPA will make the kind of difference that Mozilla thinks it might. I believe it’s naive to imagine that any advertiser would prefer PPA to the more invasive industry standard methods of tracking. It would be nice if that wasn’t the case, but, I don’t see how PPA would be preferable for advertisers, who want more data, not less.
As a user, having more of my online activity available and distributed doesn’t help or benefit me in any way.
Kudos for putting together good reasons that you don’t like PPA, while also acknowledging that Mozilla is trying to solve a problem.
Yours is one of the very few reasonable objections I’ve read IMO - when the PPA outrage first erupted, I read through how it worked. Unique ID + website unaware of interaction, but browser recognizing, then feeding it to an intermediate aggregator that anonymizes data by aggregating from multiple users without sharing their IDs, with the aim of trying to find a middle ground seems fair to me. Especially with the opt-out being so easy.
However, your points about classes clickbait encouragement, SEO feeding, and the uncertainty that this will solve the web spamminess as it is are valid concerns.
Why should we give advertisers any data at all, I don’t get it? I agree it’s better than how tracking is being done today, but why create a tool to distribute information about my behavior across different sites (yes, anonymized)?
Because hosting costs money, and sustainable services need revenue sources.
News we read was put together by a team of journalists, editors, etc.
Video streaming takes a lot of storage, bandwidth, processing, licensing.
And so on.
Price gouging is bad, but reasonable income is necessary.
Billboard ads that don’t target users and don’t track effectiveness are dangerous financially for advertisers, and would pay much less to ad hosters.
Anonymous, aggregated tracking is a healthy compromise.