| Engineer on the Tiles team at Mozilla here. We're trying to create a new way for ads to be targeted.
In the classical model, the server tracks wherever you've been on the internet. Basically, to show you relevant ads, at least one entity needs to know where you've been. What we're trying to achieve is similar, except there is no tracking. Most of the decisioning (e.g. which sites similar to the target group have you been on before?) is made in Firefox. The ad server will send many ads based on a user's geo (as determined by IP address) and locale (browser language, e.g. en-US). This package will include more Tiles (some are sponsored, some are not) than Firefox will decide to show. While we do get data based on the impressions and other interactions with the Tile, we only get the strict minimum needed to compute our counts. And on the topic of IP addresses, we consider that sensitive information. We only keep the raw data for a very short while (7 days). The only thing that is kept for longer is the aggregate data, e.g. how many impressions tile X did on day Y. |
Why would you even perceptually compromise user privacy. You have to realize there are many using your browser with expectations of privacy. If you perceptually damage this notion, you're going to loose mind share.
If this goes into firefox, I'll be looking for an alternative.