The digital advocacy group NOYB (None Of Your Business) filed a complaint submitted to the Austrian data protection authority against Mozilla, for which, according to the accusation, the company tracks users’ activities without consent. According to a group founded in Vienna by data protection activist Max Schrems, the manufacturer of the Firefox browser activated a feature called “privacy-preserving attribution” (PPA) by default during the last update without user consent.
PPA allows websites to request the browser to store data related to ad interactions, which they then receive in the form of a package. Although this practice is less invasive than traditional tracking cookies, using the feature without consent may violate the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR. The situation can be aggravated by the fact that it is possible to deactivate the function with a switch hidden in the browser settings and not clearly placed.
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The case could be uncomfortable for the browser maker, which emphasizes stronger data protection, as the failure to ask for user consent raises mistrust among activists. According to Felix Mikolasch, noyb’s data protection lawyer, the company thus followed in Google’s footsteps and essentially turned its product into a tool for measuring advertisements.
For now, Mozilla defends itself by saying that the function helps websites measure the performance of their ads, but without collecting personal data. NOYB believes that even this approach violates the data protection of users according to EU laws, so it calls on Mozilla to make the PPA available within the opt-in system and to delete the data collected illegally.
Firefox currently has an estimated 178 million users, making it approximately 3.36 percent of the Internet browser market across all digital platforms. With a share of 6.5 percent for desktop computers, it is the fourth most popular browser after Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Safari.
Source: www.hwsw.hu
