Mozilla wants privacy-friendly advertising on the web
The makers of the Firefox browser have acquired Anonymous, a company that wants to make the world of online advertising more respectful.
(Image: Sundry Photography/Shutterstock.com)
The Mozilla Corporation, part of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation – which in turn develops the Firefox browser, the Thunderbird e-mail software and the Pocket bookmarking service – acquired the online advertising analysis company Anonymous last week. Since then, there have been repeated discussions on the web, especially in the open-source community, which Mozilla likes to see as an important part of the community, whether this move could undermine trust in the charitable work of the Mozilla Foundation.
Anonym offers services that enable advertising companies to find out how well their online advertising is working. The company wants to answer the question of which audience the advertisements reach without violating the privacy of individuals. The company was founded as a start-up in 2022 by former employees of Facebook parent company Meta, and has not yet made a major appearance in the online advertising market.
The advertising industry is to be weaned off tracking
Historically, the online advertising industry has overtaken traditional offline advertising for one simple reason: Tracking. Because advertising networks track the movements of readers and viewers through the web and thus find out a lot about them, they can display their customers' advertising more effectively and accurately than is possible with print magazines and television formats. The whole thing comes at the expense of the privacy of everyone on the Internet.
Anonymous and Mozilla now plan to wean the advertising industry off this luxury and offer them slightly less accurate information in a way that respects the advertising audience's desire for more privacy. This is no coincidence, as legislators in Europe and the US have been trying for years to implement this same desire and force advertising companies to adopt a more privacy-friendly approach.
Data-driven advertising solutions on a confidential computer platform
In principle, this mission fits in well with Mozilla, as the organization has long been fighting against abusive behavior when collecting user data. In April 2022, for example, Mozilla criticized Google and Apple's initiatives to make their advertising more privacy-friendly and suggested simply collecting less data instead. Now the company has apparently changed its mind and wants to enter this market itself in order to "raise the industry standard for privacy-friendly digital advertising", as Mozilla CEO Laura Chambers says.
Anonymous claims to use "sophisticated, data-driven advertising solutions on a state-of-the-art, confidential computer platform". To this end, data on the audience to be advertised to is collected using a "secure system" and then anonymized. This means that the characteristics of website visitors are separated from their personal information. The aim is to obtain results that provide important insights for advertisers, but no longer allow conclusions to be drawn about individual persons – tracking light, so to speak. As part of this process, the data is alienated with a background noise using algorithms for differential privacy, which is intended to further protect privacy.
Mozilla's dependency on the advertising industry
Can this work? In purely technical terms, privacy-friendly online advertising is certainly feasible. The problem is rather that users have to trust Mozilla that everything will really be implemented as promised. Since Anonymous, and therefore Mozilla, is in possession of the same amount of data as other advertising networks before the data is anonymized, the company could theoretically do the same as other advertising companies. So far, the commitment to privacy-compliant digital advertising is nothing more than a promise. The technically more elegant solution, as proposed by Mozilla itself two years ago, would be not to collect this data in the first place.
Especially as Mozilla has always had an ambivalent relationship with the advertising industry. For years, the company tried to curb the industry's ever-increasing tracking and data collection mania with technical means in its own browser. At the same time, Mozilla accepted more than half a billion dollars from Google to place its main advertising product, Google Search, prominently in its own browser. With the world's largest advertising company as its biggest financial backer, Mozilla is fundamentally dependent on the advertising industry.
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