At first, it may be surprising to see Mozilla and Meta working together to track ads. Mozilla has always been a serious critic of Meta (formerly Facebook) regarding privacy and security. This collaboration will definitely not make Mozilla users and fans happy. As the company reports in its blog, they want to collaborate with Meta over developing “a new proposal that aims to enable conversion measurement – or attribution – for advertising called Interoperable Private Attribution, or IPA.” Their collaboration started a few months ago. Also, their goal is to provide an environment for advertisers to measure the success rate of their online ads. The Interoperable Private Attribution (IPA) promises to provide privacy guarantees to advertisers.
This partnership can disappoint Mozilla fans
The whole concept revolves around making it difficult for third parties to see how users interact with ads. In this concept, a Multi-Party Computation (MPC) prevents a third party (like websites, browser makers, or advertisers) from learning about user behavior. Mozilla has previously developed a similar tool called Prio that analyzes how people use Firefox. Moreover, it uses an aggregated system to produce standalone results that cannot be linked to individual users. The company says IPA is still in the development phase. The efforts of Mozilla and Meta to develop a mechanism such as IPA seem good. But one issue that may concern Mozilla users is Meta’s abysmal track record in protecting its users’ privacy. Over the years, Meta has been repeatedly accused of violating users’ privacy, disclosing personal information, and illegally tracking users’ behavior for advertising purposes. Some countries have even imposed heavy fines on the company for similar reasons. Criticism of Meta has escalated to the point where even the company wanted to leave the EU. Although Meta eventually denied the news, it said that operating in the European market would require a new data transfer agreement between the continent and the United States. Mozilla is aware of the possible criticism and therefore has tried not to spread the news on its social networks as much as possible. Mozilla’s Twitter account has not yet covered the news. Mozilla’s move to work with Meta comes as a surprise as the company announced last month that it is partnering with The Markup to monitor how Meta tracks and collects users’ information. The former accused is a partner today.
