STOCKHOLM, Sept 25 (Reuters) - Vienna-based advocacy group NOYB on Wednesday said it has filed a complaint with the Austrian data protection authority against Mozilla accusing the Firefox browser maker of tracking user behaviour on websites without consent.
NOYB (None Of Your Business), the digital rights group founded by privacy activist Max Schrems, said Mozilla has enabled a so-called “privacy preserving attribution” feature that turned the browser into a tracking tool for websites without directly telling its users.
Mozilla had defended the feature, saying it wanted to help websites understand how their ads perform without collecting data about individual people. By offering what it called a non-invasive alternative to cross-site tracking, it hoped to significantly reduce collecting individual information.
The problem is that Librewolf’s continued existence depends on Firefox continuing to exist. And while I like Vivaldi (but not its closed-sourceness), if all browsers end up being Chromium-based, Google still has an effective monopoly on web standards.
If the only reason google doesn’t have a monopoly on web standards is because firefox “exists”, then I think Google does in fact have a monopoly on web standards. Other browsers exists besides chrome and firefox ones, some like Konqeror even work pretty well for how old they are, but I think firefox is eventually going to see the same fate as netscape slowly becoming more and more irrelevant, and unlike netscape they can’t exactly sue Google for anti-trust (at least not without losing 90% of their funding)