Mozilla

Judge Leonie Brinkema is ready to be done with the DOJ v. Google saga; Amazon DSP comes out on top; and Mozilla brings programmatic ads to to the Firefox browser.

Judge Mehta defends his light touch in addressing Google’s search monopoly; the de minimis exemption for imports is over, and it could ding Q4 ad spend; and a whistleblower says Meta ignored WhatsApp’s privacy lapses.

Remedies in the federal search antitrust case against Google landed with a thud earlier this week. Most publishers and ad industry pundits were sorely disappointed.

Google’s search antitrust trial ends with a whimper; the pitfalls of agency-owned SSPs; Perplexity axes its ads business; and brands are still building big-ticket metaverse experiences.

If the court ultimately orders Google to spin off AdX or DFP, the result would be a fundamental rebalancing of power across the digital advertising supply chain. For marketers, the implications are just as significant.

Meta and Mozilla’s new browser-based attribution system for web ads appears to solve an interesting math problem. But if applied to real-world advertising, it will increase privacy risks for users, writes Raptive’s Don Marti.

This week, we bring on the CEO and CTO of privacy tech startup Anonym, which was acquired by Mozilla, to talk about PETs (privacy-enhancing technologies) and how Mozilla plans to use its tech to create a more private internet.

Two years after leaving Meta to launch their own privacy-focused ad measurement startup in 2022, Graham Mudd and Brad Smallwood have sold their company to Mozilla.

Under The Hood When Gary Numan sang, “Here in my car, I feel safest of all,” he didn’t know about the rapacious data collection practices of modern-day automakers. Ars Technica reports that, late last week, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) sent letters to 14 car companies, including Ford, GM, Honda and Hyundai, asking pointed questions about […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Demand More Google has started its global rollout of Demand Gen, a machine-learning ad product launched in beta over the summer. Demand Gen is akin to Performance Max, Google’s most prominent machine learning-based ad product … which is a euphemistic way to say […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Browser Bowsers A decades-long truce among browser operators – Apple Safari, Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome – is dissolving as Google and Microsoft militarize their platform borderlands. Last year, Google introduced a one-click button for Windows devices that set Chrome as the […]

If CNAME access and third-party cookies go away, identity companies – and most of their clients and partners – are going to get hurt, and badly, writes Kevin Mullen, chief product officer at Roq.ad.

While Chrome dallies on the third-party cookie question, Firefox keeps releasing new anti-tracking features. Marshall Erwin, Mozilla’s chief security officer, dishes on everything from cracking down on fingerprinting to its unlikely collaboration with Meta on privacy-preserving attribution technology.

It’s time to stop talking and start doing. That’s the raison d’être, in a nutshell, behind a new community group – the Private Advertising Technology Community Group – housed within the World Wide Web Consortium.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. W3C Meets Ad Tech Drama The W3C is negotiating a tricky influx of members and attention as it becomes an increasingly important stakeholder in online advertising. That’s because browser operators like Chrome, Apple’s Safari WebKit group, Microsoft Edge and Mozilla are the W3C natives, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. IPO Craze Another day, another IPO. The latest ad tech company seeking to go public is Altice’s programmatic platform Teads, which filed with the SEC to trade on the Nasdaq, The Wall Street Journal reports. Teads is looking to tap investors while they’re hot […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Staff Cuts Magnite is laying off about 6% of its staff following its $1.17 billion acquisition deal with video supply-side platform SpotX, Adweek reports. Buying SpotX is part of Magnite’s CTV growth plan, after already taking on Telaria. Though the acquisition nearly doubled […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Supercookies Crumble The newest version of Mozilla’s browser, Firefox 85, includes protection against so called “supercookies.” What the heck are supercookies? According to Mozilla, they can be used in place of ordinary cookies to store user identifiers, but are much more difficult to delete […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Net’ Benefits Netflix investors have been worried about its high costs, unprofitability and increased competition. But that same balance sheet is starting to look like a safe harbor. “In fact, Netflix’s liquidity position and the tailwinds from social distancing combine to give the company […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Tough Cookie Mozilla, operator of the Firefox web browser, will block the IAB’s DigiTrust ID, an anonymized, cookie-based identifier used by ad tech and media companies, Digiday reports. Firefox has single-digit share in the browser market – just 4% – but it’s a blow to […]

Mozilla’s decision to bail on its brief romance with its advertising products caught many insiders by surprise. The company said Monday it would end its sponsored tile offering, which it had released November 2014. Adzerk CEO James Avery, who was involved in briefings earlier this year meant to set the stage for Mozilla’s foray into […]

Mozilla is in a tough spot. Building a big ad business is key to the nonprofit’s well-publicized revenue diversification strategy, but many targeting techniques that are considered table stakes in digital advertising – such as cookie matching, third-party ad serving and CRM onboarding – are off limits. The main issue is not that Firefox users value their […]

Mozilla is putting the pedal down on its foray into digital ads. In recent weeks, the provider of open-source software has met with a range of ad tech companies in a bid to do more with the audience data and ad space generated by its still popular Firefox browser. In February and March, Mozilla’s content […]

Update 4:00 ET: In a recently-released blog post, Mozilla VP of content services Darren Herman announced the kick-off of an experimental program called Directory Tiles. Normally, when Firefox users open a new tab, they see tiles featuring images from sites they’d visited in the past. New users with no Firefox surfing history will, upon opening the […]

Mozilla wants to build content personalization into future generations of its products, and has recruited MDC Partners’ Darren Herman to lead that charge as VP for content services. Herman – a digital agency exec and startup entrepreneur – will head up a brand new Content Services division focused on building out a content experience within the […]

The advertising industry continues to debate privacy issues, including when advertisers may collect information about consumers. Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox browser, has added fuel to the controversy through its experiments with a cookie-blocking patch and a Cookie Clearinghouse—actions that the IAB’s Randall Rothenberg denounced as “arrogant.” Mozilla also announced in a blog post […]

Jonathan Mayer, a Stanford graduate student who has been a highly vocal advocate for consumer privacy, has resigned from the Tracking Protection Working Group, which is charged with setting the browser spec for a “Do Not Track” mechanism. In an email delivered yesterday afternoon to members of the Working Group, Mayer writes, “We do not […]

Two weeks after unveiling the “Cookie Clearinghouse,” a joint project between Mozilla and the Stanford Center for Internet and Society that would determine which websites are allowed to set cookies, Mozilla execs and CIS director of privacy Aleecia McDonald shed more light on the project today at a public discussion. “This initiative is about creating […]

As the debate over the intersection of consumer privacy and online advertising rages, a recent announcement that browser maker Mozilla would work with Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society to create a “cookie clearinghouse” appears to have poured more fuel on the fire. Debuted by Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich’s blog on June 19, and then reiterated in […]

Disagreements continue between the advertising industry and privacy advocates as advertisers point to potential weaknesses in the “Cookie Clearinghouse” project that Mozilla, maker of the Firefox browser, and the Stanford Center for Internet and Society’s have unveiled. The Cookie Clearinghouse promises to create two lists of domains: one for those that browsers would permit to […]