Linux Mint approach to the Firefox's "Website Advertising Preferences" enabled by default

[kam193]

Mozilla has included a so far experimental (but not being part of experiments) feature implementing Privacy-Preserving Attribution aka ad tracking, but with Mozilla-in-the-middle and some rules [1]. I'd like to ask if the Linux Mint team has some opinion on the matter that it is enabled by default, even on existing installations with the disabled usage data collection [4].

For the record, to keep the discussion calm, the real impact is currently very low as it should be used only on a few websites for tests (I found mentioning one Mozilla-owned [7]). But it's a good time to discuss if it's aligned with Linux Mint principles and if Linux Mint could do something in their package, e.g. disable it by default or place a banner that it has been enabled.

The API itself is arguable, and I don't believe it makes sense to discuss it very deeply here. I have some mixed thoughts on that. But what is clear, this is collecting data of user's activity and exposing it (in some summarized form) to advertisers. And it has been enabled by default without any information or respecting other privacy settings, it may even cross FF container boundaries [8].

I do second opinions from [4] stating that it should not be enabled by default / when user decided not to allow collecting usage data. I'd ask if Linux Mint would consider disabling it by default in their Firefox distribution.

References:

1. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution - official documentation
2. https://mastodon.social/@mcc/112775362045378963 - mastodon post criticising the feature
3. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1900929 - Bugzilla metabug about PPA
4. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1907791 - bugzilla report summarizing the issue with user consent around the implementation
5. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1907659 - bugzilla discussion if it could be disabled by default
6. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1907660 - bugzilla bug about not clear enough description what it does
7. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1904811 - bugzilla bug about enabling PPA for https://irlpodcast.org/
8. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1901103 - bugzilla to discuss it PPA should work cross-containers