this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2024
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It's illegal in Europe to have an opt-out checked by default, must be an opt-in unchecked by default. This is one of the reason that Microsoft has always troubles in Europe about privacy and opt-out services.
That only applies to personally-identifiable information.
In the EU*
Sorry to be pedantic, but the UK, Swiss etc. are all in Europe but not in the legislative region where this law applies.
This even gets some people confused thinking those countries “aren't in Europe”, which is why I wanted to correct this.
For what it's worth, the UK still has the GDPR-derived law, though the decisions by the EU courts may no longer affect execution of it. Plenty of non-EU European countries, though.
If it is truly anonymized then it isn't protected under GDPR.
Which should tell you a lot; if Mozilla wasn’t confident about their anonymisation efforts their lawyers would not have allowed checked-by-default.
PII is being processed, even if it's not being sold to advertisers. The underlying protocol works based on some session identifiers that uniquely identify a device to the aggregators. I don't think that's GDPR proof per se.
I don't think any DPA will have a problem with this system assuming they implement their side of the system correctly, but I wouldn't be too sure about Mozilla following the GDPR. They've defaulted to a lot of data collection without explicit consent over the years.