Firefox 128 has an experimental Privacy Preserving Attribution (PPA) API designed to help ensure user privacy and help advertisers target ads. In reality, innovation risks having the opposite effect.
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With the release of Firefox 128, PPA technology is enabled by default, something Mozilla hopes will set a new standard for targeted advertising on the web. The API will help website developers evaluate the effectiveness of advertising without collecting data about resource visitors – this is an alternative to tracking user actions across multiple sites using cookies, which have been blocked in Firefox and some other browsers other than Chrome for years.
The basis of the PPA model is “impressions”, which are stored in Firefox every time a user sees advertising banners on the site. Based on this data, the browser generates a report, and the site retrieves the information directly from Firefox. The data is encrypted, anonymized and stored locally on the device. Advertisers receive reports on the effectiveness of campaigns, and users are protected from unauthorized access to personal information.
Google previously proposed a similar solution as an alternative to third-party cookies – the Privacy Sandbox technology is also designed to track the effectiveness of advertising by creating an anonymous user profile in the browser, but human rights activists claim that it was created solely in the interests of the advertising business. The PPA is currently working with a small number of sites in testing mode, and Mozilla hopes that the technology will become a web standard that other browsers and even perhaps Google will use. Human rights activists note that the PPA function should be disabled by default, and not enabled in Firefox.