Mozilla partners with Meta to make ads privacy-friendly

Mozilla is working with Meta on a proposal for a system to measure ad clicks with less invasion of consumer privacy. The development is striking, given that Mozilla has been critical of Meta on several occasions in the past.

Mozilla and Meta call their proposal IPA: Interoptable Private Attribution. Its purpose is to provide “strong privacy guarantees” while still allowing advertisers to see how their advertising is performing. According to the parties, this consists of two parts: multi-party computation, in which ‘no party involved can learn anything about user behaviour’. Second, they speak of an aggregated system, which means that information about users is supplied in batches and cannot say anything about an individual. “These two functions together prevent IPA from being used to track or profile users,” they say.

They shared the full proposal, which has 24 pages, via Google Docs. IPA submitted them to the W3C Private Advertising Technology Community Group, or PATCG. On Reddit, reactions are overwhelmingly negative about the collaboration between the two.

The issue is striking because to date Mozilla has repeatedly criticized Meta and Facebook and has also taken concrete steps to thwart them. For example, it offers the Facebook Container add-on, last month launched the privacy initiative the Facebook Pixel Hunt and stopped advertising on Facebook in 2018 due to the poorly protected privacy there. Last year it started advertising again on Meta platforms, but in doing so it resolved to expose in the advertisements everything Meta knows about its users, such as zodiac signs, dates of birth and interests.