Mozilla is facing a privacy complaint for using Firefox to enable tracking without getting user consent.

The Austrian data protection authority (DPA) has received a complaint from Vienna-based privacy non-profit noyb, short for None Of Your Business, against Firefox maker Mozilla for enabling a new feature called Privacy Preserving Attribution (PPA) without specifically requesting users’ consent.

“Contrary to its reassuring name, this technology allows Firefox to track user behavior on websites,” said noyb. “Basically, the tracking is now managed by the browser instead of specific websites.

Additionally, Noyb criticized Mozilla for supposedly adopting Google’s strategy by “secretly” turning on the feature by default without alerting users to it.

PPA is similar to Google’s Privacy Sandbox project in Chrome and is now enabled as an experimental feature in Firefox version 128.

Google has now abandoned the program, which aimed to replace third-party tracking cookies with a set of web browser-integrated advertising APIs that allow advertisers to learn about users’ interests and display relevant adverts.

Stated differently, the web browser serves as a mediator, storing data about the many categories into which people may be assigned according to their online surfing habits.

According to Mozilla, PPA is a “non-invasive alternative to cross-site tracking,” allowing websites to “understand how their ads perform without collecting data about individual people.”

Additionally, it is comparable to Apple’s Privacy Preserving Ad Click Attribution, which permits online marketers to gauge the success of their campaigns without jeopardizing user privacy.

PPA functions as follows: Ad-serving websites can request that Firefox remember their advertisements in the form of an impression, which contains information about the advertising themselves, including the destination website.