EU group says new Firefox feature is tracking users: Here’s how to turn it off

Vienna based digital rights group None of Your Business (NYOB) says the new Firefox feature goes against EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Mozilla Firefox's new PPA feature is developed in collaboration with Meta. (File photo)

Mozilla, the nonprofit foundation responsible for the development of Firefox was recently accused of tracking user behaviour without their consent.

The Vienna based privacy rights group None of Your Business, popularly known as NYOB filed a complaint against the organisation and said that its new privacy feature is tracking Firefox users behaviour across different websites.

Dubbed“Privacy Preserving Attribution (PPA)”, the new feature was developed in collaboration with Meta in 2022 and is turned on by default in Firefox v128, which was launched in July this year.

According to None of Your Business, “this technology allows Firefox to track user behaviour on websites. In essence, the browser is now controlling the tracking, rather than individual websites.”

🚨 Firefox quietly enabled a supposed “privacy feature” that tracks users – noyb files complaint today!
Read more here: https://t.co/DoVHAmP3KQ

— noyb (@NOYBeu) September 25, 2024

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The group goes on to say that while it is better than the “invasive cookie tracking” method, the developers did not ask users if they want to turn it on. Instead, the feature was turned on by default when users upgraded to a new version of Firefox. This is alarming because Mozilla is known for being a privacy friendly alternative to other popular browsers like Chrome and Edge.

NYOB claims that PPA enables Firefox to store user data about ad interaction and offer it to advertisers and “similar to Google’s Privacy Sandbox, this turned the browser into a tracking tool for websites.”

While Mozilla says that the new feature helps protect user privacy by measuring ad performance without offering personal data to individual websites, NOYB claims that the tracking is done in Firefox, which goes against the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

If you are using Firefox, the PPA feature can be disabled by heading over to the browser’s Privacy and Security settings and unticking the option named “Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement.”