Noyb Austrian human rights group (None of your Business), founded by activist Max Schrem, filed a complaint to the Austrian data protection department against Mozilla. The organization accuses Firefox browser developers of tracking user behavior on sites without their consent.
The essence of Noyb’s claims is that Mozilla included the Privacy Preserving Attribution (PPA) function in the browser, which, according to the group, turns Firefox into a user tracking tool without directly notifying users. Although this technology aims to reduce the invasiveness of advertising, Noyb argues that it still violates users’ rights to confidentiality as per EU laws.
Mozilla representatives have stated that the limited testing of PPA is part of their efforts to explore technical alternatives to aggressive advertising. The company maintains that the new methods prevent personality identification or tracking of activity by both Mozilla itself and other parties. However, Noyb insists that including the function as a default setting violates user rights, and users should have the option to choose whether to participate in such experiments.
“It is unfortunate that an organization like Mozilla believes users are incapable of making independent decisions,” said Felix Mikolash, a lawyer for data protection at Noyb. He emphasized that the function should be disabled by default to allow users to decide whether to participate in testing.
Noyb is demanding that Mozilla inform users about its data processing actions, implement an opt-in system requiring preliminary consent, and delete all illegally processed data of millions of users.