FW: Misconceptions about Firefox's Privacy Preserving Ad Measurement
In the past couple of weeks, there have been many posts going around about Firefox's new PPA setting. The simple warning being: turn this off, this is a further invasion of our privacy, this is outrageous, etc. I won't share specific posts but that's the gist of it. I initially turned the setting off for myself, as a precaution, with the intention of reading more. The most I could find, at first, was the official documentation from Mozilla:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution
Unfortunately this a very wordy document, but after reading it I did get a better understanding of what's going on: in short, PPA is a way to provide advertisers with data about conversion rates for their ads without tracking individual people and sharing their data. Immediately, this sounds like a good thing. It's an alternative to invasive trackers that so many people are (rightfully) upset about. But what wasn't clear to me was what would happen if you de-selected the Privacy Preserving Ad Measurement Setting, so I went on a search.
I couldn't find much. The most useful thing I found was a post on Reddit that linked to a post on a privacy-focused blog. Full disclosure: I did not read said post, but from what I gather it's a bit of fearmongering about companies eating away at our privacy and about Mozilla being hypocritical in its methods.
Enter Andrew Moore's piece: Misconceptions about Firefox's Privacy Preserving Ad Measurement
I feel that this is a very good counter-argument to the idea that this setting being turned on by default isn't such a bad thing after all. Here's the "tl;dr" provided by Andrew:
Mozilla’s PPA initiative shifts metrics and tracking away from tracking you as an individual, towards tracking the ad campaign in a personal privacy preserving way. The way those metrics are collected ensures individual privacy, and enables advertisers to measure the success of a campaign without having to track you.
As someone who really values personal privacy, and despises advertising and tracking, I will be keeping PPA enabled in my browsers as it reduces the incentive from AdTech companies to track in an invasive way. It also simplifies my blocking of telemetry as I only have the DAP service endpoints to block. -- Andrew Moore
I highly recommend that you read the entire blog post - in my view he provides a compelling argument for keeping this setting turned on. I think the most important line from the post is this one:
You have to remember that the alternative is NOT the absence of tracking, but invasive personalized tracking done by ad networks. Doing aggregate tracking in the most private way is the less invasive option between the two. -- Andrew Moore
This is exactly what I was speculating, that turning the setting off doesn't mean you're not still being tracked1, it just means that you're not using the alternative - blocking trackers and instead sending anonymized data through PPA. This is the best answer that I've found through the last few days of searching around and I'm going to stick by it until I see a credible source. I'm not going to let people crying out on social media about the latest invasion of privacy when I can tell they haven't looked beyond the name of the setting.
As with anything you read online, I encourage you to seek out multiple sources before jumping to conclusions. I read the most recent Decoding Everything newsletter in which David Chen quotes On The Media's 2013 handbook. The relevant bullet point here is "Compare multiple sources" and "Beware reflexive retweeting". Think critically about what you're reading and what you're sharing, and everyone will be better off.
Edit, 11:19AM: I forgot that I wanted to mention that I did find it a little hypocritical that Moore says he loathes advertising and blocks everything, but at the same time accepts that ads are necessary to so that people have wide access to information instead of locking things behind a paywall.
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I know - you can block these trackers with extensions. But with PPA, in theory, you wouldn't need to block these trackers. But as Moore points out, you can use this setting in conjunction with your current blocking methods; and he points out a way you can even prevent the PPA tracking data from being shared.↩