Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

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Firefox added ad tracking and has already turned it on without asking you (mastodon.social)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 138 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (40 children)

I haven’t looked into the technicals much further than the support page.

The way i read it, it sounds like the companies will get some general data if their ads work without a profile about you being created. I would be fine with that. What I don’t like is the lack of communication to users about it being enabled.

PPA does not involve websites tracking you. Instead, your browser is in control. This means strong privacy safeguards, including the option to not participate.

Privacy-preserving attribution works as follows:

Websites that show you ads can ask Firefox to remember these ads. When this happens, Firefox stores an “impression” which contains a little bit of information about the ad, including a destination website.

If you visit the destination website and do something that the website considers to be important enough to count (a “conversion”), that website can ask Firefox to generate a report. The destination website specifies what ads it is interested in.

Firefox creates a report based on what the website asks, but does not give the result to the website. Instead, Firefox encrypts the report and anonymously submits it using the Distributed Aggregation Protocol (DAP) to an “aggregation service”.

Your results are combined with many similar reports by the aggregation service. The destination website periodically receives a summary of the reports. The summary includes noise that provides differential privacy.

This approach has a lot of advantages over legacy attribution methods, which involve many companies learning a lot about what you do online.

PPA does not involve sending information about your browsing activities to anyone. This includes Mozilla and our DAP partner (ISRG). Advertisers only receive aggregate information that answers basic questions about the effectiveness of their advertising.

This all gets very technical, but we have additional reading for anyone interested in the details about how this works, like our announcement from February 2022 and this technical explainer.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (7 children)

Given that it collects no additional user data, and the API in question is a new standard that will require sites to opt in, I think making it an opt-out is sensible. I guess they could make a popup about it, but I really think this concern is baseless FUD from people who haven't read the details.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I think making it an opt-out is sensible

Why? I'm not in the business of making ad companies' jobs easier.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

Let's be real, there's no way PPA is going to be as valuable as the data that can be gathered by state of the art ad tech. So the ad companies that adopt this will be making a compromise to do so. How is this tech making their lives easier?

Also they have no incentive to develop this tech, so why would they? It's not like Mozilla is doing work for them that they would have done anyway. If anything they're probably worried that the tech will take off and then legislation will follow to force them to use it.

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