If there’s anything in tech that gets people all riled up, it’s data privacy. Firefox announced on Reddit that it’s testing a new privacy feature, with the help of Meta, that it hopes will manage to not gather personal data, yet still allow advertising.
Firefox’s Privacy Woes
Firefox needed something to put themselves back on the right side of public opinion. They appear to have found it. Initially, Mozilla released a prototype feature to Firefox 128 that was enabled by default. It was used to collect personal data for advertisers. That comes on the heels of Apple promising in ads to not collect data, while Google is going back on its promise to eliminate third-party cookies to advertisers.
Bobby Holley, Firefox CTO, posted to Reddit to let users know that Firefox 128 isn’t as bad as it sounds, The goal is not just to deliver your personal data to advertisers, but to allow advertisers to get what they are looking for, while also allowing you to keep your privacy. This is akin to Google’s reversal of promise and now claiming they are simply giving users a choice.
It will be up to users to decide whether Holley’s explanation assures them that using Firefox will keep them and their data safe.
Firefox CTO’s Reddit Post
Holley did his best to cheerlead for Firefox. He admitted that there was much discussion about Firefox 128 but feels they just weren’t clear enough about what the “private attribution prototype” actually entailed.
He stated that solving the “massive web of surveillance” is the reason many people work for Mozilla. He furthered it by saying that their historical approach to surveillance has been browser-based anti-tracking features. He believes that while they have a good track record, this model has “two inherent limitations.” This boils down to advertisers trying to bypass the system and some users just accepting the defaults they are given.
Firefox wants to instead design a system that doesn’t have those limitations. They are collaborating with Meta, believing that if both companies are heavy with the new system’s outcome, they’ll have a better shot at hitting their goal.
The Private Advertising Technology Community Group has been working on this very thing. Holley noted that they have released an experimental prototype of the concept in Firefox 128. Holley sees the prototype as “feature-wise quite bare-bones but uncompromising on the privacy front.”
The prototype implements a Multi-Party Computation system, DAP/Prio. Some of the best cryptographers have put it to the test. It’s a temporary prototype. The expectation is for it to be low-volume. The goal is for it to inform the PATCG work and make it more successful. It’s not targeting users so much as measuring what they do on the Internet.
Holley feels the inner workings of the prototype are stronger than and unlike others and that it meets the higher bar that is expected of it. Additionally, you can turn it off whenever you want.
He believes that the surveillance aspect of digital advertising could be eliminated if his company gets it right. Holley added that a “truly private attribution mechanism would make it viable for businesses to stop tracking people and enable browsers and regulators to clamp down much more aggressively on those [who] continue to do so.”
If you’d rather stick with a browser with more of a promise of privacy, check out the top browsers with a focus on privacy.
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