Mozilla is adding Suggested Tiles ads to Firefox

ZD Net reports Mozilla is going ahead with the the hated "Suggested Tiles", a new feature that will display ads on new tabs in Firefox. The browser makers claims its Suggested Tiles will respect your user privacy, but a certain amount of non-Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data will be collected in order to deliver relevant ads.

The way I understand it, the tiles are based on your browsing history but this data is not send to Mozilla. With Suggested Tiles activated, the browser will fetch all available suggested tiles based on country and language, and will then decide which tiles to show.

Herman added, "With Suggested Tiles, we want to show the world that it is possible to do relevant advertising and content recommendations while still respecting users' privacy and giving them control over their data."

That said, Firefox does send your browser Mozilla interaction history with the Tiles feature. Once there, your raw data is stored in the system's storage and analysis engine, Disco. The aggregated data is then saved to a data warehouse, Redshift. This data is then used to create high-level aggregate reports for advertisers.

Specifically, a Mozilla representative said Mozilla collects the following data:

Language preference

Tile ID

How many times the Tile was displayed

Where in the grid of tiles a Tile was displayed

What interaction the user has with a Tile:

"Rolled over"

"Hovered over"

Pinned

Blocked

Clicked

Moved