Laura Chambers, who replaced Mitchell Baker as CEO of Mozilla Corporation this year, has revealed an initiative related to Mozilla's entry into the advertising display platform market. Mark Surman, CEO and president of the Mozilla Foundation, made a similar announcement. In building its advertising network, Mozilla is going to use technology from the recently acquired startup Anonym. The latter are the creators of an alternative infrastructure for the advertising industry.
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In its advertising platform, Mozilla intends to ensure user privacy and achieve a balance between commercial profit and public interest.
According to Mozilla, in the foreseeable future, advertising will continue to be the key driver of the Internet. Because of ads most content remains freely available to users.
The main issue of modern ads is the lack of control over the collection and transfer of user data. Mozilla intends to solve this issue by providing its own product based on the principles of privacy, openness and the right to choose.
The company also committed to being as transparent and open as possible, and to informing the community of its intentions and plans before testing and integrating project-related functionality into the browser.
Laura and Mark again apologized for the poor communication surrounding the inclusion of Privacy Preserving Attribution (PPA) in Firefox, which led to confusion, speculation, and concern, despite the fact that it was not actually enabled for external users.
Mozilla Ad Plarform
Mozilla plans to create a new infrastructure for the online advertising industry that will use cryptography and differential privacy methods to prove that advertising can support businesses without disclosing personal data.
Anonym, whose technology will form the basis of the Mozilla advertising platform, was founded in 2022 by two former Meta vice presidents who tried to implement the idea of storing data in a secure environment using encryption. So advertisers, advertising platform owners, and advertising network employees will not have access to information on individual users. Analytics of the effectiveness and determination of the results of advertising campaigns are proposed to be formed on the basis of processing anonymized data.
To prevent individual users from being tracked, the Anonym platform uses differential privacy methods. Those allow statistical operations to be performed on a set of encrypted data with sufficient accuracy without decryption and without the ability to identify individual records in it.
For example, based on encrypted statistics of an advertising network about ad impressions and encrypted statistics of an advertiser about purchases, the platform, without having access to the values of specific records, can analyze the intersections of data sets in a generalized form to assess the effectiveness of an advertising campaign.
Thus, an advertiser can find out the number of users who viewed an ad and made purchases in his online store, but will not be able to determine which users these are from the total set of all buyers.
It will be interesting to see how the community reacts to this news, especially in light of the recent removal of uBlock Lite from the Firefox add-on store.
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On my Firefox, it is no longer possible to turn on “Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement” anymore.
https://i.imgur.com/k4XrT5P.png
I know Mozilla had/has some problems with it in EU countries.
I have mixed feelings about this! I want the web to be open to everyone, but as it looks today, it doesn’t work well. Then I think a browser should just be a browser and have nothing to do with advertising at all.