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.
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.