STOCKHOLM, Sept 25 (Reuters) - Vienna-based advocacy group NOYB on Wednesday said it has filed a complaint with the Austrian data protection authority against Mozilla accusing the Firefox browser maker of tracking user behaviour on websites without consent.

NOYB (None Of Your Business), the digital rights group founded by privacy activist Max Schrems, said Mozilla has enabled a so-called “privacy preserving attribution” feature that turned the browser into a tracking tool for websites without directly telling its users.

Mozilla had defended the feature, saying it wanted to help websites understand how their ads perform without collecting data about individual people. By offering what it called a non-invasive alternative to cross-site tracking, it hoped to significantly reduce collecting individual information.

  •  Venia Silente   ( @veniasilente@lemm.ee ) English
    6•7 hours ago

    NOYB would’ve done much better by talking to Mozilla directly and advocating for them to do the right thing going for a legal complaint as the final nuclear option. I

    It has been already vastly demonstrated by Mozilla, that going to them and talking to them about how they shouldn’t do shitty things doesn’t work.

    If it takes legal action to even try and save the browser, I’m all for it.

    •  dr-robot   ( @dr-robot@fedia.io ) 
      1•3 hours ago

      Okay, but what if after all this legal action Mozilla decides that it’s no longer worth serving the privacy conscious crowd? Which browser will you use then?

      Things only happen in a desirable direction if there is dialogue. Linus made the decision about making Linux GPL but he is against aggressive enforcement. He thinks it’s much smarter to go and slowly convince the offending parties that it’s in their benefit.

      •  Venia Silente   ( @veniasilente@lemm.ee ) English
        2•3 hours ago

        Okay, but what if after all this legal action Mozilla decides that it’s no longer worth serving the privacy conscious crowd? Which browser will you use then?

        Firefox.

        Just because the execs decide to stop serving the software, doesn’t mean the copies (and source code!) already out in the wild will automagickally stop functioning. You’ll still be able to visit websites the day after, the month after, the year after… And there’s still the devs, since they’re not the execs.

        By the time there’s issues, there’ll still be the forks. Someone will have already step up to fork and keep the work on their own, too; the name just weighs enough that someone will want to be “the next Firefox” (not “the next Mozilla”). Or even better, the devs (obvs not the execs) will have jumped ship into any one of the various alternative projects such as ladybird, or might even have started a new project from scratch, hopefully intending for it to be a leaner and better browsr.

        •  dr-robot   ( @dr-robot@fedia.io ) 
          1•2 hours ago

          Sorry, but I don’t believe that’s realistic. Devs need to be paid. To be paid they need execs. Donations might sustain a small project, but not a web browser. Linux is developed primarily by devs employed by the big corporations. It would never survive on donations and volunteer labour. Same for Firefox. A browser is too complicated to be run as a GitHub project.

          •  Venia Silente   ( @veniasilente@lemm.ee ) English
            2•2 hours ago

            You can have one or two execs, as a treat; but certainly they don’t need to be paid crazy figures like what has been the case with Mozilla as of late. It’s not like they’re that important, in particular for the kind of project something like Firefox is (which could do with eg.: coop governance).