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Discussion
Right. I’m getting tired of seeing people dump on Firefox and Mozilla about this thing in the release notes:
Firefox now supports the experimental Privacy Preserving Attribution API, which provides an alternative to user tracking for ad attribution. This experiment is only enabled via origin trial and can be disabled in the new Website Advertising Preferences section in the Privacy and Security settings.
What is this? And why is it not something to get heated about?
Attribution is how advertisers know how to pay the right site owner when someone clicks on their ad. It’s important for ad-supported sites that clicks get attributed.
Right now, attribution is basically incompatible with protecting privacy. Advertisers use every method of tracking you can name, and some you can’t, to provide accurate attribution.
The Privacy Preserving Attribution API is an experimental way of informing an advertiser that someone clicked on an ad on a given site without leaking that it was you, specifically, who did that. Specifically, ads using the API ask Firefox to remember that they were seen, on what sites, and to what sites they lead. Then, when the user visits the destination site, the destination site asks Firefox to generate a report and submit it via a separate service that mixes your report with reports from other people and forwards these aggregated reports in large batches. Any traces that might be unique to you are lost in the crowd.
This is still experimental, being enabled by Mozilla on a site-by-site basis as developers request it. It’s not a free-for-all yet, and I can only find one entry on Bugzilla of a site who’s requested it.
@Ephera nonsense. Clearly possibilities for Facebook, who invented this, to show everyone a unique enough ad, that even with mixing and smudging in the 3rd party reporter, they can tell you clicked it, because you are in a cohort of one, even if the ad reporting service says 100 slightly different people did it.
Since you know this with such certainty, you should sue them.
@Ephera can’t afford that. They’ve won. Look how long #noyb has taken, and still not got changed, over all of the current shit.
#privacy