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Firefox added ad tracking and has already turned it on without asking you (mastodon.social)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

How does this violate the GDPR? It increases privacy and stops advertisers tracking everything you do. This seems to be a good thing.

Advertisers have always been interested in where their ads are seen and whether they convert to purchases. A common example is vouchers, which will tell the advertiser exactly this (10p off, customer redeems, store returns to advertiser, advertiser knows where you got the voucher from/where you saw the advert, where you bought the product - exactly what Firefox is trying to tell them)

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Firefox creates a report based on what the website asks, but does not give the result to the website. Instead, Firefox encrypts the report and anonymously submits it using the Distributed Aggregation Protocol (DAP) to an “aggregation service”.

Mozilla can't send user data to an "aggregation service" without explicit consent, no matter how much propaganda they use to explain it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

But it's OK to send more - and probably PII - tracking data directly to the website without consent?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Also no. But 2 wrongs don't make a right.

You are speaking like there are only two alternatives and none of them involves following the law.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

In which case I suggest you file a GDPR violation against all web browsers, as by default they will be allowing tracking and sending data to advertisers.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

One thing is allowing the other is actively collecting and processing the data.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

It increases privacy and stops advertisers tracking everything you do.

No, it doesn't stop advertisers from doing anything. They can still do everything they did before. This is just an additional thing that advertisers can use to track conversions from ad impressions.