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.
It isn’t about indvidual privacy. It’s about not further empowering the wealthy and the entities that serve them. I’m disappointed with Mozilla, but this seems to have become par for the course
Hmm, interesting. I would expect NOYB to not just file complaints for no reason, but my understanding of PPA is that things get aggregated, which would make it irrelevant for the GDPR. Either I’m missunderstanding something, or NOYB or Mozilla is…
people refuse to boycott anything, for any amount of time. thats what leads to getting to be so expensive.
in reality, it would be ideal if everyone was willling to boycott anything (maybe everything ) for any amount of time ( possibly up to a max of infinity )
Hopefully this makes some of the Firefox shills finally realize it’s time to change our recommendations.
There’s still nothing better, you just have to be careful to block all their moneymaking bullshit attempts like save-your-shit-into-our-pocket and virginity-preserving assfucking. I use Fennec on android, though.
Yeah, and using those is pretty good, but they don’t really do anything you can’t do just by changing settings in Firefox, and if Firefox doesn’t have any users those die right along with it.
LibreWolf is better, includes ublock and no tracking by default.
There are good chromium based browsers too, I’m not aware of Vivaldi having any major controversies or shady business decisions in recent years, it has a built in adblock thats independent of chromium’s upstream.
If you disqualify every browser due to its upstream having issues then you should probably revert to using CURL or something convoluted like what richard stallman does. Every browser that exists today is a fork of some browser that previously was good but started to suck.
The problem is that Librewolf’s continued existence depends on Firefox continuing to exist. And while I like Vivaldi (but not its closed-sourceness), if all browsers end up being Chromium-based, Google still has an effective monopoly on web standards.
If the only reason google doesn’t have a monopoly on web standards is because firefox “exists”, then I think Google does in fact have a monopoly on web standards. Other browsers exists besides chrome and firefox ones, some like Konqeror even work pretty well for how old they are, but I think firefox is eventually going to see the same fate as netscape slowly becoming more and more irrelevant, and unlike netscape they can’t exactly sue Google for anti-trust (at least not without losing 90% of their funding)
I don’t think chromium should ever be encouraged. That is the one browser family trying and mostly succeeding at swallowing up the Internet. Google already has way too much power over the Internet, and it will only get worse if people don’t start leaving their ecosystem
The choice is basically between Firefox or skinned Chromium.
Do you really want to experience first-hand just why Internet Explorer was this hated?
Here’s a hint: de facto monopoly on browser market that allowed them to control the web standards back then and their ideas were not good.
it has become a sinking ship and I’m eager to see who picks up the shards and runs with it.
I don’t think you have any idea how much work it takes to create a new browser.
I was thinking WebKit was closer to Netscape in origin.
You made me go look it up. 😉 and I think we’re both wrong….
(Here’s my edit…. Poster above is right. I read it wrong, so only I am wrong on the origin of WebKit)
Below from Wikipedia:
WebKit started as a fork of the KHTML and KJS software libraries from KDE.
On April 3, 2013, Google announced that it had forked WebCore, a component of WebKit, to be used in future versions of Google Chrome
As a user, ‘privacy preserving attribution’ is unappealing for a few reasons.
It seems it would overwhelmingly benefit a type of website that I think is toxic for the internet as a whole - AI generated pages SEO’d to the gills that are designed exclusively as advertisement delivery instruments.
It’s a tool that quantitatively aids in the refinement of clickbait, which I believe is an unethical abuse of human psychology.
Those issues notwithstanding, it’s unrealistic to assume that PPA will make the kind of difference that Mozilla thinks it might. I believe it’s naive to imagine that any advertiser would prefer PPA to the more invasive industry standard methods of tracking. It would be nice if that wasn’t the case, but, I don’t see how PPA would be preferable for advertisers, who want more data, not less.
As a user, having more of my online activity available and distributed doesn’t help or benefit me in any way.
Kudos for putting together good reasons that you don’t like PPA, while also acknowledging that Mozilla is trying to solve a problem.
Yours is one of the very few reasonable objections I’ve read IMO - when the PPA outrage first erupted, I read through how it worked. Unique ID + website unaware of interaction, but browser recognizing, then feeding it to an intermediate aggregator that anonymizes data by aggregating from multiple users without sharing their IDs, with the aim of trying to find a middle ground seems fair to me. Especially with the opt-out being so easy.
However, your points about classes clickbait encouragement, SEO feeding, and the uncertainty that this will solve the web spamminess as it is are valid concerns.
Why should we give advertisers any data at all, I don’t get it? I agree it’s better than how tracking is being done today, but why create a tool to distribute information about my behavior across different sites (yes, anonymized)?
Turning the feature on by default is bad, but I don’t think that legal complaints are the way to go as well as the aggressive tone of NOYB. Firefox is the only browser developed and maintained professionally which has the potential of offering some privacy on the web. Given the importance of web browsers volunteer work just won’t cut it with the amount of features and security concerns that a browser needs.
NOYB would’ve done much better by talking to Mozilla directly and advocating for them to do the right thing going for a legal complaint as the final nuclear option. If the was the case, then good that there’s a complaint, but the article does not indicate the any of this happened.
NOYB has the right to send a complaint if it think a company infringe upon right to privacy. Mozilla isn’t entitled to special treatment or special notice before filling a complaint.
Mozilla should have expected this. They claim to defend users privacy so they should understand why consent for data collection is important. Also there was public outcry and criticism of opt-out, and yet they haven’t backed down.
If Mozilla resolve these issues, NOYB could ask for the complaint to be dropped. I hope they do resolve this, and do drop the complaint.
there is this approach where if the neighbor is loud, you first try to speak with them, and if they don’t care then you go to the police. have you heard of it?
talking to Mozilla directly and advocating for them to do the right thing going for a legal complaint as the final nuclear option
Fuck that, they know what they’re doing and they know what the right thing is. Mozilla is the enemy for some time now, Firefox’s development is basically held hostage by a shitty corporation and a toothless foundation.
Absolutely not and is not what I said. Just that due to lack of alternatives it’s not really beneficial for privacy enthousiasts to make the only browser with privacy features dislike the community it’s working for. If NOYB has the resources for a legal complaint, it has the resources to lead this dialogue.
Why do you assume they haven’t warned Mozilla in advance?
Also, Mozilla was fully aware that what they were doing is in breach of GDPR. I find it extremely hard to believe that the makers of Firefox are not fully familiarized with it by now.
Last but not least Mozilla is doing this for financial gain. It’s selling pur data to advertisers. Why should we excuse it? It’s a very hostile act.
If Mozilla has hit rock bottom and has been reduced to selling our data to survive then that’s that. We’ll find another way and another FOSS browser. Accepting it is not an option.
NOYB would’ve done much better by talking to Mozilla directly and advocating for them to do the right thing going for a legal complaint as the final nuclear option. I
It has been already vastly demonstrated by Mozilla, that going to them and talking to them about how they shouldn’t do shitty things doesn’t work.
If it takes legal action to even try and save the browser, I’m all for it.
Okay, but what if after all this legal action Mozilla decides that it’s no longer worth serving the privacy conscious crowd? Which browser will you use then?
Things only happen in a desirable direction if there is dialogue. Linus made the decision about making Linux GPL but he is against aggressive enforcement. He thinks it’s much smarter to go and slowly convince the offending parties that it’s in their benefit.
Okay, but what if after all this legal action Mozilla decides that it’s no longer worth serving the privacy conscious crowd? Which browser will you use then?
Firefox.
Just because the execs decide to stop serving the software, doesn’t mean the copies (and source code!) already out in the wild will automagickally stop functioning. You’ll still be able to visit websites the day after, the month after, the year after… And there’s still the devs, since they’re not the execs.
By the time there’s issues, there’ll still be the forks. Someone will have already step up to fork and keep the work on their own, too; the name just weighs enough that someone will want to be “the next Firefox” (not “the next Mozilla”). Or even better, the devs (obvs not the execs) will have jumped ship into any one of the various alternative projects such as ladybird, or might even have started a new project from scratch, hopefully intending for it to be a leaner and better browsr.
Sorry, but I don’t believe that’s realistic. Devs need to be paid. To be paid they need execs. Donations might sustain a small project, but not a web browser. Linux is developed primarily by devs employed by the big corporations. It would never survive on donations and volunteer labour. Same for Firefox. A browser is too complicated to be run as a GitHub project.
You can have one or two execs, as a treat; but certainly they don’t need to be paid crazy figures like what has been the case with Mozilla as of late. It’s not like they’re that important, in particular for the kind of project something like Firefox is (which could do with eg.: coop governance).
Hope this results in Firefox changing it to be opt in and not result in Firefox going the way of the dodo - We can’t have Chromium be the only option, and without somebody developing base Firefox, the forks are going to die off
Yeah but Firefox and signal are both stalling and taking weird routes otherwise. It feels like people in charge either don’t understand the usebase or just botching it on purposes while getting paid out.
It is OS so if it gets that bad, adults will need to pitch and pay a team to get the job done to cater to our needs. Devs can’t slave for us for free at some point enjoyers will have to pay for all Foss goodness.
Shit ain’t free and you don’t win wars without funding. While most of US is poor AF or don’t give a fuck, I am pretty sure avg fediverse enjoyer is in a bit stronger economic position.
Either way, we know big tech is coming for all of us…
How is Signal taking weird routes? I know about their weird payment system thing with their own shitcoin, but has anything been added more recently? I’m quite happy that they finally added usernames.
If the Servo engine + accompanying browser will look like a Terminal pulled out of darkness into a desktop environment or an app developed in 1998 by Microsoft/any other UI designer at the time this is nothing I’d would want to use at work nor at home even if I am paid to use it…
Arkenfox user.js, or derivative broswers like Librewolf on the desktop and Mull on android are there for a reason. Firefox default settings are not the safer, although it has all the knobs to make it a much better experience.
Falkon browser isn’t a bad choice, there is no ad tracking, There’s block auto playing video function built in. All around a solid privacy respecting browser, compared to Firefox and Chrome.
I abandoned Firefox for Falkon for the last 2 years and hadn’t regretted it.
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It isn’t about indvidual privacy. It’s about not further empowering the wealthy and the entities that serve them. I’m disappointed with Mozilla, but this seems to have become par for the course
Hmm, interesting. I would expect NOYB to not just file complaints for no reason, but my understanding of PPA is that things get aggregated, which would make it irrelevant for the GDPR. Either I’m missunderstanding something, or NOYB or Mozilla is…
100% agree, anonymized data is pretty much irrelevant to the GDPR. An exception would be if it can be de-anonymized with reasonable means.
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people refuse to boycott anything, for any amount of time. thats what leads to getting to be so expensive.
in reality, it would be ideal if everyone was willling to boycott anything (maybe everything ) for any amount of time ( possibly up to a max of infinity )
so, beyond cookies is it?
I switched today to Librewolf and the transition was smooooth. Highly recommended
“B… but Mozilla fights for privacy and the free internet!!!11!!11!!”
Well deserved
Hopefully this makes some of the Firefox shills finally realize it’s time to change our recommendations.
I’ve heard so much shit lately about Firefox, it has become a sinking ship and I’m eager to see who picks up the shards and runs with it.
There’s still nothing better, you just have to be careful to block all their moneymaking bullshit attempts like save-your-shit-into-our-pocket and virginity-preserving assfucking. I use Fennec on android, though.
There are forks, like libre wolf (desktop) and mull (Android) that don’t ship with some of the bullshit, Firefox ships.
Yeah, and using those is pretty good, but they don’t really do anything you can’t do just by changing settings in Firefox, and if Firefox doesn’t have any users those die right along with it.
LibreWolf is better, includes ublock and no tracking by default.
There are good chromium based browsers too, I’m not aware of Vivaldi having any major controversies or shady business decisions in recent years, it has a built in adblock thats independent of chromium’s upstream.
If you disqualify every browser due to its upstream having issues then you should probably revert to using CURL or something convoluted like what richard stallman does. Every browser that exists today is a fork of some browser that previously was good but started to suck.
The problem is that Librewolf’s continued existence depends on Firefox continuing to exist. And while I like Vivaldi (but not its closed-sourceness), if all browsers end up being Chromium-based, Google still has an effective monopoly on web standards.
If the only reason google doesn’t have a monopoly on web standards is because firefox “exists”, then I think Google does in fact have a monopoly on web standards. Other browsers exists besides chrome and firefox ones, some like Konqeror even work pretty well for how old they are, but I think firefox is eventually going to see the same fate as netscape slowly becoming more and more irrelevant, and unlike netscape they can’t exactly sue Google for anti-trust (at least not without losing 90% of their funding)
I don’t think chromium should ever be encouraged. That is the one browser family trying and mostly succeeding at swallowing up the Internet. Google already has way too much power over the Internet, and it will only get worse if people don’t start leaving their ecosystem
Ladybird is a completely new open source browser with it’s own from scratch engine, so that’s one that hasn’t been forked from any other browser
And what else should be recommended?
The choice is basically between Firefox or skinned Chromium.
Do you really want to experience first-hand just why Internet Explorer was this hated?
Here’s a hint: de facto monopoly on browser market that allowed them to control the web standards back then and their ideas were not good.
I don’t think you have any idea how much work it takes to create a new browser.
I think there’s kind of a 3rd choice, WebKit.
Chrome was great, till it wasn’t. IE always was bad. Edge is chromium.
Firefox has stayed closer to “don’t be evil” than many companies. Is say far more than the other options.
WebKit is really only available on Apple devices in any meaningful way.
Completely agree. I understood WebKit to be a different browse engine than chromium or Firefox.
While chromium and Firefox have wider platform options, there’s “kind of” a 3rd runner even though locked to apple.
I agree Linux and open source is king.
That’s where Chromium came from originally, so not really 3rd.
I was thinking WebKit was closer to Netscape in origin.
You made me go look it up. 😉 and I think we’re both wrong…. (Here’s my edit…. Poster above is right. I read it wrong, so only I am wrong on the origin of WebKit)
Below from Wikipedia:
WebKit started as a fork of the KHTML and KJS software libraries from KDE.
On April 3, 2013, Google announced that it had forked WebCore, a component of WebKit, to be used in future versions of Google Chrome
Labybird is a completely new upcoming open source browser, complete with its own from scratch engine
Theres also Servo an open source engine led by the Linux Foundation
Ah yes, let’s recommend the browser that is “targeting a first Alpha release for early adopters in 2026.”
deleted by creator
I see these comments are nothing but good discussion!
doesn’t sound good
As a user, ‘privacy preserving attribution’ is unappealing for a few reasons.
It seems it would overwhelmingly benefit a type of website that I think is toxic for the internet as a whole - AI generated pages SEO’d to the gills that are designed exclusively as advertisement delivery instruments.
It’s a tool that quantitatively aids in the refinement of clickbait, which I believe is an unethical abuse of human psychology.
Those issues notwithstanding, it’s unrealistic to assume that PPA will make the kind of difference that Mozilla thinks it might. I believe it’s naive to imagine that any advertiser would prefer PPA to the more invasive industry standard methods of tracking. It would be nice if that wasn’t the case, but, I don’t see how PPA would be preferable for advertisers, who want more data, not less.
As a user, having more of my online activity available and distributed doesn’t help or benefit me in any way.
Kudos for putting together good reasons that you don’t like PPA, while also acknowledging that Mozilla is trying to solve a problem.
Yours is one of the very few reasonable objections I’ve read IMO - when the PPA outrage first erupted, I read through how it worked. Unique ID + website unaware of interaction, but browser recognizing, then feeding it to an intermediate aggregator that anonymizes data by aggregating from multiple users without sharing their IDs, with the aim of trying to find a middle ground seems fair to me. Especially with the opt-out being so easy.
However, your points about classes clickbait encouragement, SEO feeding, and the uncertainty that this will solve the web spamminess as it is are valid concerns.
Why should we give advertisers any data at all, I don’t get it? I agree it’s better than how tracking is being done today, but why create a tool to distribute information about my behavior across different sites (yes, anonymized)?
Because hosting costs money, and sustainable services need revenue sources.
News we read was put together by a team of journalists, editors, etc.
Video streaming takes a lot of storage, bandwidth, processing, licensing.
And so on.
Price gouging is bad, but reasonable income is necessary.
Billboard ads that don’t target users and don’t track effectiveness are dangerous financially for advertisers, and would pay much less to ad hosters.
Anonymous, aggregated tracking is a healthy compromise.
Turning the feature on by default is bad, but I don’t think that legal complaints are the way to go as well as the aggressive tone of NOYB. Firefox is the only browser developed and maintained professionally which has the potential of offering some privacy on the web. Given the importance of web browsers volunteer work just won’t cut it with the amount of features and security concerns that a browser needs.
NOYB would’ve done much better by talking to Mozilla directly and advocating for them to do the right thing going for a legal complaint as the final nuclear option. If the was the case, then good that there’s a complaint, but the article does not indicate the any of this happened.
NOYB has the right to send a complaint if it think a company infringe upon right to privacy. Mozilla isn’t entitled to special treatment or special notice before filling a complaint.
Mozilla should have expected this. They claim to defend users privacy so they should understand why consent for data collection is important. Also there was public outcry and criticism of opt-out, and yet they haven’t backed down.
If Mozilla resolve these issues, NOYB could ask for the complaint to be dropped. I hope they do resolve this, and do drop the complaint.
there is this approach where if the neighbor is loud, you first try to speak with them, and if they don’t care then you go to the police. have you heard of it?
Nope, no further. Downvoted and blocked.
Don’t you fucking try and justify this.
deleted by creator
Fuck that, they know what they’re doing and they know what the right thing is. Mozilla is the enemy for some time now, Firefox’s development is basically held hostage by a shitty corporation and a toothless foundation.
🙄
Right, but what other browser are you going to use?
Big “what are you going to do, vote republican?” energy here.
So what, are we giving Mozilla a free pass to do anything now? Is the new bar “not quite as shitty as Google”?
Absolutely not and is not what I said. Just that due to lack of alternatives it’s not really beneficial for privacy enthousiasts to make the only browser with privacy features dislike the community it’s working for. If NOYB has the resources for a legal complaint, it has the resources to lead this dialogue.
Why do you assume they haven’t warned Mozilla in advance?
Also, Mozilla was fully aware that what they were doing is in breach of GDPR. I find it extremely hard to believe that the makers of Firefox are not fully familiarized with it by now.
Last but not least Mozilla is doing this for financial gain. It’s selling pur data to advertisers. Why should we excuse it? It’s a very hostile act.
If Mozilla has hit rock bottom and has been reduced to selling our data to survive then that’s that. We’ll find another way and another FOSS browser. Accepting it is not an option.
It has been already vastly demonstrated by Mozilla, that going to them and talking to them about how they shouldn’t do shitty things doesn’t work.
If it takes legal action to even try and save the browser, I’m all for it.
Okay, but what if after all this legal action Mozilla decides that it’s no longer worth serving the privacy conscious crowd? Which browser will you use then?
Things only happen in a desirable direction if there is dialogue. Linus made the decision about making Linux GPL but he is against aggressive enforcement. He thinks it’s much smarter to go and slowly convince the offending parties that it’s in their benefit.
Firefox.
Just because the execs decide to stop serving the software, doesn’t mean the copies (and source code!) already out in the wild will automagickally stop functioning. You’ll still be able to visit websites the day after, the month after, the year after… And there’s still the devs, since they’re not the execs.
By the time there’s issues, there’ll still be the forks. Someone will have already step up to fork and keep the work on their own, too; the name just weighs enough that someone will want to be “the next Firefox” (not “the next Mozilla”). Or even better, the devs (obvs not the execs) will have jumped ship into any one of the various alternative projects such as ladybird, or might even have started a new project from scratch, hopefully intending for it to be a leaner and better browsr.
This hope just feels like cope to me. Glad you have a positive outlook on life regardless.
No hope, no cope. Just a basic understanding on how the HTTP infrastructure and time dilation work.
Sorry, but I don’t believe that’s realistic. Devs need to be paid. To be paid they need execs. Donations might sustain a small project, but not a web browser. Linux is developed primarily by devs employed by the big corporations. It would never survive on donations and volunteer labour. Same for Firefox. A browser is too complicated to be run as a GitHub project.
You can have one or two execs, as a treat; but certainly they don’t need to be paid crazy figures like what has been the case with Mozilla as of late. It’s not like they’re that important, in particular for the kind of project something like Firefox is (which could do with eg.: coop governance).
Hope this results in Firefox changing it to be opt in and not result in Firefox going the way of the dodo - We can’t have Chromium be the only option, and without somebody developing base Firefox, the forks are going to die off
That battle is lost. Wait for ladybird or servo if you have any hope.
I could see tor browser continuing to be developed. There are enough users who are technical enough to take on a browser project.
Yeah but Firefox and signal are both stalling and taking weird routes otherwise. It feels like people in charge either don’t understand the usebase or just botching it on purposes while getting paid out.
It is OS so if it gets that bad, adults will need to pitch and pay a team to get the job done to cater to our needs. Devs can’t slave for us for free at some point enjoyers will have to pay for all Foss goodness.
Shit ain’t free and you don’t win wars without funding. While most of US is poor AF or don’t give a fuck, I am pretty sure avg fediverse enjoyer is in a bit stronger economic position.
Either way, we know big tech is coming for all of us…
How is Signal taking weird routes? I know about their weird payment system thing with their own shitcoin, but has anything been added more recently? I’m quite happy that they finally added usernames.
There’s always the Ladybird browser and an independent open source browser engine called Servo that’s under The Linux Foundation
If the Servo engine + accompanying browser will look like a Terminal pulled out of darkness into a desktop environment or an app developed in 1998 by Microsoft/any other UI designer at the time this is nothing I’d would want to use at work nor at home even if I am paid to use it…
deleted by creator
Currently: If it’s on Windows, sure. If it’s Linux only, no because I have no desktop environment on my server.
Please stop taking the dark path, firefox…
There are no ethical companies, only ones that are currently more profitable to operate as if they were.
And they rely on our good will…
Use the forks folks
Arkenfox user.js, or derivative broswers like Librewolf on the desktop and Mull on android are there for a reason. Firefox default settings are not the safer, although it has all the knobs to make it a much better experience.
Falkon browser isn’t a bad choice, there is no ad tracking, There’s block auto playing video function built in. All around a solid privacy respecting browser, compared to Firefox and Chrome.
I abandoned Firefox for Falkon for the last 2 years and hadn’t regretted it.
For good privacy (from fingerprinting) it is undoubtedly a bad choice.