From Mozilla:
Privacy-Preserving Attribution | Firefox HelpFirefox 128 introduces privacy-preserving attribution, allowing advertisers to measure campaign performance while protecting user privacy. ...
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. ...
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. ...
Criticism from Jonah Aragon at Privacy Guides:
"Privacy-Preserving" Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us Yet Again"No shady privacy policies or back doors for advertisers" proclaims the Firefox homepage, but that's no longer true in Firefox 128.
Less than a month after acquiring the AdTech company Anonym, Mozilla has added special software co-authored by Meta and built for the advertising industry directly to the latest release of Firefox, in an experimental trial you have to opt out of manually. This "Privacy-Preserving Attribution" (PPA) API adds another tool to the arsenal of tracking features that advertisers can use, which is thwarted by traditional content blocking extensions. ...
One Mozilla developer claimed that explaining PPA would be too challenging, so they had to opt users in by default. ...
I believe this feature is only in the desktop version of Firefox 128, and not in the versions for mobile devices. See the Mozilla link above for info on how to opt-out.
#
Firefox #
privacy
