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.
All the naysayers in these comments read like shills and if they aren’t, they really should read how the tracking in question works. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution?as=u&utm_source=inproduct
While it was kinda lame for Mozilla to add it with it already opted-in the way they did, they were still completely open about how it works from the start with a link right next to the feature in settings (the same link pasted above) and it’s far less invasive than the other mainstream browsers.
It can be turned off too, easily. It requires unchecking a checkbox. No jumping through 10 different menus trying to figure out how to turn it off, like a certain other browser does with its monstrous tracking and data collection machine.
With ublock origin it’s also moot, since ublock origin blocks all the ads anyways.
Call me a fanboy if you want, I wont care. Firefox is still the superior browser in my opinion.
I think a big part of the problem is that they didn’t show anyone a notification or an onboarding dialog or whatever about this feature, when it got introduced.
Firefox is still the superior browser in my opinion.
or the least bad, as I have been thinking about it lately
I think a big part of the problem is that they didn’t show anyone a notification or an onboarding dialog or whatever about this feature, when it got introduced.
Right. Not only didn’t they notify anybody, but they took to Reddit to defend the decision not to notify anybody:
we consider modal consent dialogs to be a user-hostile distraction from better defaults, and do not believe such an experience would have been an improvement here.
Which is strange, because Mozilla has no problem with popups in general.
Yeah, as I said it was pretty lame how they added it in. I will repeat that I think it’s still not as bad as how other mainstream browsers add unwanted features but I’m out of the loop there and could be wrong.
Strange, only once do I recall seeing a pop up from Firefox, which was letting me know another browser was trying to become my default browser which I did not do or want. So in that case it was useful, as it was Edge and I did not want Edge to be my default browser. That was years ago, back when I still used Windows. Not saying it doesn’t happen of course, you have links I could check which I assume show it does, but I have not personally witnessed it happen in a long time.
That’s probably the better way of putting it. As far as mainstream browsers go.
Nah. Turning that feature on by default already set in stone for me their willingness to test the waters. If you don’t think auto-enabling anti-privacy features is a problem I don’t know what to tell you. It may be “small” right now, but just wait and see what else they will try to sneak in.
Use Librewolf and Mull instead.
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I use Mull on my phone. Haven’t gotten around to playing with Librewolf but it is on my list of things to do.
I don’t consider the addition to be an anti-privacy feature however. I’d like to see someone change my mind about that.
Any company that is willing to enable options (such as advertising) without users permission/consent is anti privacy. While it may not be a big deal for you now, wait to see what else they try to explain away. You act as if ublock is just automatically installed for users, thus making this not a big deal. what about the thousands if not millions of users on default firefox? The fact that Mozilla did this without letting the user know it is on by default, is inherently anti privacy. Hell I would argue turning it on by default is inherently anti privacy. Especially when they try to explain it away on reddit when they faced backlash. “There has to be a reason our users are upset? Am I the bad guy? No it’s the users who are bad!” It is a reminder that no company is your friend. This is a test to see what they can and cannot get away with. A test to see if the users notice/if enough would really jump ship to create an impact on their product.
I jumped ship as soon as this feature was found. Fuck that.
Librewolf is fantastic, it’s FOSS Firefox. I have had absolutley no issues getting firefox extensions to work with librewolf.
You seem to have misunderstood what i said. You fail to address the actual concept i refer to and the attitude with which you do this is not productive. it’s insulting, assumptive and hostile.
are you sure you read my comment correctly? you spouted off about tangential issues in what appears to me, a sort of wild rage. you make an accusation and assumptions about me and how i act. you trash mozillas reaction to the outcry of their addition. you speculate a conspiracy theory about mozilla only trying to get away with stuff and hypothesize about them being ignorant and clueless.
i get it, you have strong feelings about privacy. you now hate mozilla for thier treachery. this was the final straw that made you jump ship. i’m glad you quickly found a browser that works for you. thanks for the unsolicited endorsement of your personal solution. good to hear that it has absolutely no issues with extensions made for firefox. which librewolf was forked from… so why wouldn’t they? is getting in a one way shouting match meant to convince people to convert to another browser?
my statement was intended as invitation for someone to provide an argument as to how the actual addition to firefox is not privacy respecting, like the actual inner workings of it. not assumptions about its creators or their motives or the method of its introduction or how the nefarious villians behind such great injustice must be burned at the stake. not the far reaching ramifications it might lead to. what is it doing that makes one persons personal privacy specifically affected?
Please explain how I came off as insulting? Nowhere in my statement was it meant to come off as insulting. If you are referring to the quote “am I the bad guy” I was talking about mozilla and trying to use the principle skinner meme in text format. It was a joke. It wasn’t directed at you. My entire point is to not trust companies. There is no good company. Mozilla was doing good things but the fact of the matter is they put in an unnessescary feature and enabled it by default. Giving users control of settings they want right out of the gate is pro privacy, when you start choosing what you think is best for the user. That is anti-privacy.
To you that is “kinda lame” but you then explain it away by saying “at least it isn’t as bad as other browsers that make you jump through hoops!” That is where we fundamentally disagree. Bad is still bad for me, and my line is unmovable. Whereas for you there is a line you are willing to move. You asked me why it was inherently anti-privacy and I explained that any company willing to enable a slimy feature by default like this is on the path to become anti-privacy/already is. what you confuse for hostility was me informing you on my posiition.
This isn’t some conspiracy theory, way to be reductive. Companies always require growth and profit. If you think this is a conspiracy theory I have no idea how we even continue this conversation. Mozilla doesn’t give two shits about you or I. Google started off as a company with the slogan “do no evil” look at how that is going. Do you trust that Google still is doing no evil because they had a slogan? No, you don’t trust Google because they have built up this anti-privacy reputation. That started with a simple search engine.
Mozilla is testing the waters in what they can get away with. I was trying to provide alternatives for people who like Firefox but don’t know where to go. I am actually trying to provide solutions rather than explain away a companies behavior as you seem to be doing (And you called us the shills which is ironic). If you don’t like this and are worried about the implications there are other options.
Jesus Christ and you called me assumptive. Did I say anywhere to burn the creators of the Mozilla CORPORATION at the stake? No. Did I say anywhere that I hate mozilla? No. Did I say anywhere that the creators of the Mozilla Foundation are “nefarious villains” ? No. Did I say anywhere about mozilla being ignorant and clueless? No. They know exactly what they are doing and that is the problem. I think that companies are emotionless entities that seek profit over well being.
Also where was this “wild rage” you talk about. TBH your reply is more insulting than my response. Talk about pot calling the kettle black.
Please tell me why this feature needed to be on by default? The absolute necessary reason this feature had to be turned on for every user. Why the user couldn’t turn it on themselves? Do you think the user is too stupid to know what is best for themselves? If they came up with a pop up for you that says “this feature tracks you, do you want to enable it?” would you turn it on?
“not the far reaching ramifications it might lead to.” Oh I get it, you only care if it is harming you now (which it is). Not what these actions could lead to in the future. You are like a frog in a boiling pot of water. The thing is this shit is gradual. My argument is simply stating that this is the start of something you may not want to be a part of in the future.
In the blogpost you link they specifically say that this feature tracks you but not in the normal cookie way you are used to. Tracking is still tracking and it’s gross. Tracking is anti-privacy do you agree? Tracking should not be enabled by default. Period. Tracking as an out of the box feature and not something a user chooses to opt into is anti-privacy.
If you wanted a specific type of answer for your “invitation” then be more specific when you ask. You replied to me with that question, I gave you my answer and you didn’t like it.
You still can’t do it. this is pointless. have a nice day.
Again you just don’t like my answer. Yet you have nothing to say about it being factually incorrect.
You too.
While it was kinda lame for Mozilla to add it with it already opted-in the way they did
That’s really the rub here. Reading the technical explainer on the project, it’s a pretty good idea. The problem is that they came down on the side of “more data” versus respecting their users:
Having this enabled for more people ensures that there are more people contributing to aggregates, which in turn improves utility. Having this on by default both demands stronger privacy protections — primarily smaller epsilon values and more noise — but it also enables those stronger protections, because there are more people participating. In effect, people are hiding in a larger crowd.
In short, they pulled a “trust us, bro” and turned an experimental tracking system on by default. They fully deserve to be taken to task over this.
is this something I need to do every single update?
The answer will always from now on be ‘yes’, for every annoying privacy invading toggle you have to change, it is in the best interest of the software creators to force you to do it in the way that benefits them most.
Our opinions are no longer as important as their ability to harvest our data.
Not if you switch browsers.
It’s been a wild ride, but it’s time to get off.
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All the naysayers in these comments read like shills
Amusing people of what you are guilty of. Sounds familiar…
Yes, how amusing indeed. Unless you meant to type ‘assuming’? Either way, I’m more of a fanboy, not a shill. Shill’s get paid. Fanboys just like their product.
If it’s added as already opted in, I assume they pop something up to make it clear what’s been added and enabled, and how it affects the user’s privacy, with a link to the settings to change it if desired?
If so, that’s not too bad, no.
If they added it and didn’t make it clear, or worse yet didn’t call attention to it at all, that would piss me off.
They didn’t, just like every other mainstream browser does. It was pretty lame. It was in the change notes but I don’t know too many people that read those anymore. Their explanation of the system and the ease to turn it off placated me. I have the feature on and have had it on since the day it was released.
Pest vs Cholera situation here…
Firefox should do an opt-in and they usually open new page with major updates with a pretty whats new changelog.
Just make it a headline topic ffs.Regarding it’s just clicking this one textbox:
Remember: Businesses also use Firefox. If you want to protect even a shred of your co-workers or clients you need to set up a fuck-load of tools to mass-disable this one little checkbox.I find it kind of funny that your shared link url contain tracking parameters.
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Call me a fanboy if you want,
I will.
It can be turned off too, easily.
Same for Chrome.
With ublock origin it’s also moot, since ublock origin blocks all the ads anyways.
This is a non-argument; uBO ins’t even developed by Mozilla, so they don’t deserve credit for it.
Is there any opportunity to rage about Firefox that you don’t take? Seriously, so predictable
No, there isn’t. Just block me.
Done and done.
If anyone is on the fence this absolute tool shed has this in their profile:
I have no sympathy for GAFAM, nor for Mozilla.
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It isn’t about indvidual privacy. It’s about not further empowering the wealthy and the entities that serve them. I’m disappointed with Mozilla, but this seems to have become par for the course
As a user, ‘privacy preserving attribution’ is unappealing for a few reasons.
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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.
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It’s a tool that quantitatively aids in the refinement of clickbait, which I believe is an unethical abuse of human psychology.
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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.
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Please stop taking the dark path, firefox…
There are no ethical companies, only ones that are currently more profitable to operate as if they were.
Hmm, interesting. I would expect NOYB to not just file complaints for no reason, but my understanding of PPA is that things get aggregated, which would make it irrelevant for the GDPR. Either I’m missunderstanding something, or NOYB or Mozilla is…
100% agree, anonymized data is pretty much irrelevant to the GDPR. An exception would be if it can be de-anonymized with reasonable means.
User-unique gets collected, and then the user-unique data sent to a remote server.
Only on the remote server will this data be aggregated, or so Mozilla says.
Arkenfox user.js, or derivative broswers like Librewolf on the desktop and Mull on android are there for a reason. Firefox default settings are not the safer, although it has all the knobs to make it a much better experience.
doesn’t sound good
I see these comments are nothing but good discussion!
so, beyond cookies is it?
people refuse to boycott anything, for any amount of time. thats what leads to getting to be so expensive.
in reality, it would be ideal if everyone was willling to boycott anything (maybe everything ) for any amount of time ( possibly up to a max of infinity )“B… but Mozilla fights for privacy and the free internet!!!11!!11!!”
Well deserved
Hopefully this makes some of the Firefox shills finally realize it’s time to change our recommendations.
I’ve heard so much shit lately about Firefox, it has become a sinking ship and I’m eager to see who picks up the shards and runs with it.
And what else should be recommended?
The choice is basically between Firefox or skinned Chromium.
Do you really want to experience first-hand just why Internet Explorer was this hated?
Here’s a hint: de facto monopoly on browser market that allowed them to control the web standards back then and their ideas were not good.it has become a sinking ship and I’m eager to see who picks up the shards and runs with it.
I don’t think you have any idea how much work it takes to create a new browser.
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Ah yes, let’s recommend the browser that is “targeting a first Alpha release for early adopters in 2026.”
I think there’s kind of a 3rd choice, WebKit.
Chrome was great, till it wasn’t. IE always was bad. Edge is chromium.
Firefox has stayed closer to “don’t be evil” than many companies. Is say far more than the other options.
WebKit is really only available on Apple devices in any meaningful way.
Completely agree. I understood WebKit to be a different browse engine than chromium or Firefox.
While chromium and Firefox have wider platform options, there’s “kind of” a 3rd runner even though locked to apple.
I agree Linux and open source is king.
I think there’s kind of a 3rd choice, WebKit.
That’s where Chromium came from originally, so not really 3rd.
I was thinking WebKit was closer to Netscape in origin.
You made me go look it up. 😉 and I think we’re both wrong…. (Here’s my edit…. Poster above is right. I read it wrong, so only I am wrong on the origin of WebKit)
Below from Wikipedia:
WebKit started as a fork of the KHTML and KJS software libraries from KDE.
On April 3, 2013, Google announced that it had forked WebCore, a component of WebKit, to be used in future versions of Google Chrome
Hopefully this makes some of the Firefox shills finally realize it’s time to change our recommendations.
There’s still nothing better, you just have to be careful to block all their moneymaking bullshit attempts like save-your-shit-into-our-pocket and virginity-preserving assfucking. I use Fennec on android, though.
LibreWolf is better, includes ublock and no tracking by default.
There are good chromium based browsers too, I’m not aware of Vivaldi having any major controversies or shady business decisions in recent years, it has a built in adblock thats independent of chromium’s upstream.
If you disqualify every browser due to its upstream having issues then you should probably revert to using CURL or something convoluted like what richard stallman does. Every browser that exists today is a fork of some browser that previously was good but started to suck.
I don’t think chromium should ever be encouraged. That is the one browser family trying and mostly succeeding at swallowing up the Internet. Google already has way too much power over the Internet, and it will only get worse if people don’t start leaving their ecosystem
The problem is that Librewolf’s continued existence depends on Firefox continuing to exist. And while I like Vivaldi (but not its closed-sourceness), if all browsers end up being Chromium-based, Google still has an effective monopoly on web standards.
If the only reason google doesn’t have a monopoly on web standards is because firefox “exists”, then I think Google does in fact have a monopoly on web standards. Other browsers exists besides chrome and firefox ones, some like Konqeror even work pretty well for how old they are, but I think firefox is eventually going to see the same fate as netscape slowly becoming more and more irrelevant, and unlike netscape they can’t exactly sue Google for anti-trust (at least not without losing 90% of their funding)
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There are forks, like libre wolf (desktop) and mull (Android) that don’t ship with some of the bullshit, Firefox ships.
Yeah, and using those is pretty good, but they don’t really do anything you can’t do just by changing settings in Firefox, and if Firefox doesn’t have any users those die right along with it.
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