Firefox And Meta Team Up For. . . Privacy?

Over the years, Mozilla Firefox has slammed Facebook (now Meta) for the company’s lack of privacy and security, and now despite this they are teaming up for more private online advertising.

Mozilla Firefox anounced earlier this week that they have been working on a project that plans to allow advertising companies track the success of their online ads in a way that is more privacy-respecting of the targeted user than current ads. “For the last few months we have been working with a team from Meta (formerly Facebook) on a new proposal that aims to enable conversion measurement – or attribution – for advertising called Interoperable Private Attribution, or IPA.”

How Does This Work?

The main idea of how they plan to carry out this goal is to remove the current system of per-action ad reporting, wherein your browser will send data to the advertising group whenever you click on an ad, and introduce a new system which will give a report for batches of ad interaction events. The websites that users visit will create a “match key” which links to your account or device that can only be accesible by the browser.

An Unexpected Partnership

Many users are surprised to hear about the partnership given the investigation Mozilla recently launched with the goal of identifying how Meta had been supposedly tracking pixels across the web to record user web activity. Mozilla has yet to publish the post on their official Twitter account, which contrasts to their regular posting of all their criticism of Meta in recent years about their lack of privacy and dodgy ad targeting.

So far the majority of the feedback from Firefox users is mostly negative, given that Firefox is the go to browser for security and privacy and now a potential partnership with Meta contradicts everything they stand for.