The European Digital Rights Center, also known as Noyb organization, has filed a complaint with the Austrian data protection authority regarding Mozilla’s inclusion of the “Privacy Preserving Attribution” (PPA) function in Firefox. This feature is designed to transmit telemetry data to advertising networks, and Noyb alleges that it violates the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union. They argue that the PPA function allows for tracking of user behavior on websites, with tracking occurring on the browser side rather than individual sites.
Noyb’s complaint focuses not only on the technology itself but also on the methods of its implementation. They claim that the PPA function was included in Firefox without clear user consent and was not adequately reflected in Mozilla’s data protection policy. The function was set as the default option in Firefox 128, and users could only disable it through a specific section in the browser’s settings related to website advertising preferences.
Although Firefox 128 did include the PPA API, it was disabled by default and labeled as an experiment. Activation of the API required coordination through Mozilla’s Bugzilla platform and obtaining a special token. Additionally, the experiment page provides information about the developers’ opinions on the new API and its implementation.