Mozilla Has Protested Against Facebook For Years, Now Working Together To Tackle Privacy Issues

Mozilla and Meta have collaborated on implementing online based advertising. (photo: doc. mozilla)

JAKARTA - For years, Mozilla as the owner and developer of the Firefox browser has often criticized Meta, because of the company's bad record regarding its privacy and security. However, the two are now united.

Currently Mozilla and Meta have collaborated in implementing online-based advertising that is a little more personal, this has actually also drawn criticism from old Mozilla users.

“Over the past few months we have been working with the team from Meta (formerly Facebook) on a new proposal that aims to enable conversion measurement, or attribution, for ads called Interoperable Private Attribution, or IPA,” Mozilla said in its official blog post.

This project aims to enable advertisers to measure the success rate of online advertising, while respecting privacy more than existing online advertising.

The core concept, as described in the draft proposal, is to replace per-action advertising reporting. For example, a browser will send data to an ad group when a user clicks on an ad with a consolidated report for a set of events.

Then, the website can create an ad match that will connect to the user's account or device, apparently this is only accessible by the browser to avoid fingerprints.

There are also some functions that are intended to make it difficult for anyone (including the company or advertiser that collects the data) to identify the person interacting with the ad. It's similar to Prio, a technology Mozilla developed a few years ago to analyze how people use Firefox.

Launching XDA Developers, Saturday, February 12, this partnership, of course, is quite surprising. That's because Mozilla just started an experimental study last month in partnership with The Markup that aimed to identify how Meta uses tracking pixels across the web to record web activity.

Mozilla said the aim of the study was to report where Facebook could track users and what type of information they were collecting.

Both Mozilla and The Markup, have also rallied against Facebook many times, and less than a year ago, started publishing ads on the Meta platform calling the company's ad-targeting capabilities sinister.

With this collaboration, Mozilla and Meta should also be able to encourage Apple and Google to implement this behavior in their own browsers, even if it's difficult.

Google is also experimenting with replacing browser cookies with more privacy-respecting alternatives. But the project doesn't have the same goals as the IPA, and Google could theoretically implement both at the same time.