Mozilla has announced it will start showing sponsored content to Firefox users in the United States. The company stresses it will respect the privacy of users. That's possible because the personalization of the sponsored content will be done on the client side, according to the browser developer.
Earlier this year, Mozilla started to show sponsored stories once in a while in Pocket’s recommendation section on Firefox New Tab. Sponsored content will now also be shown to users who run Firefox Nightlies and beta versions.
With the launch of Firefox 60, scheduled for the 9th of May, the feature will be rolled out to all Firefox users in the United States. Because the personalization of the sponsored content happens on the client side, Mozilla claims it won't collect personal data to share with third-parties.
The company writes about that, “we’ve come to accept a premise around advertising today that users need to trade their privacy and data in exchange for personalized, high quality experiences. Our experiments over the last few months have proved that this isn’t true. We are indeed able to create personalized sponsored content that provides value to users without jeopardizing their privacy.”
Firefox will also have settings that allow users to disable sponsored content or hide specific content. It's unclear if the sponsored content will also be shown to users outside the United States.
