Last week, I participated in the European Parliament’s Technical Roundtable regarding the draft e-Privacy Regulation currently under consideration – specifically, I joined the discussion on “cookies”. The Roundtable was hosted by lead Rapporteur on the file, MEP Marju Lauristin (Socialists and Democrats, Estonia), and MEP Michal Boni (European People’s Party, Poland). It was designed to bring together a range of stakeholders to inform the Parliament’s consideration of what could be a major change to how Europe regulates the privacy and security of communications online, related to but with a different scope and purpose than the recently adopted General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Below the fold is a brief overview of my intervention, which describes our proposed changes for some of the key aspects of the Regulation, including how it handles “cookies”, and more generally how to deliver maximal benefits for the privacy and security of communications, with minimum unnecessary or problematic complexities for technology design and engineering. I covered the following three points:

We support incentives for companies to offer privacy protective options to users. The e-Privacy Regulation must be future-proofed by ensuring technological neutrality. Browsers are not gatekeepers nor ad-blockers; we are user agents.

The current legal instrument on this topic, the e-Privacy Directive, leaves much to be desired when it comes to effective privacy protections and user benefit, illustrated quite prominently by the “cookie banner” which users click through to “consent” to the use of cookies by a Web site. The e-Privacy Regulation is is an important piece of legislation – for Mozilla, for Europe, and ultimately, for the health of the global internet. We support the EU’s ambitious vision, and we will continue working with the Parliament, the Commission, and the Council by sharing our views and experiences with investing in privacy online. We hope that the Regulation will contribute to a better communications ecosystem, one that offers meaningful control, transparency, and choice to individuals, and helps to rebuild trust online.

1 – We support incentives for companies to offer privacy protective options to users.

We view one of the primary objectives of the Regulation to be catalyzing more offerings of privacy protective technologies and services for users. We strongly support this objective. This is the approach we take with Firefox: Users can browse in regular mode, which permits Web sites to place cookies, or in private browsing mode, which has our Tracking Protection technology built in. We invest in making sure that both options are desirable user experiences, and the user is free to choose which they go with – and can switch between them at will, and use both at the same time. We’d like to see more of this in the industry, and welcome the language in Article 10(1) of the draft Regulation which we believe is intended to encourage this.

2 – The e-Privacy Regulation must be future-proofed by ensuring technological neutrality.

One of the principles that shaped the current e-Privacy Directive was technological neutrality. It’s critical that the Regulation similarly follow this principle, to ensure practical application and to keep it future-proof. It should therefore focus on the underlying privacy risk to users created by cross-site and cross-device tracking, rather than on specific technologies that create that risk. To achieve that, the current draft of the Regulation would benefit from two changes.

First, the Parliament should revise references to specific tracking techniques, like first and third party cookies to ensure that other forms of tracking aren’t overlooked. While blocking third party cookies may seem at first glance to be a low hanging fruit to better protect user privacy and security online — see this Firefox add-on called Lightbeam, which demonstrates the amount of first and third party sites that can “follow” you online — there are a number of different ways a user can be tracked online; via third party cookies is only an implementation of one form (albeit a common one). Device fingerprinting, for example, creates a unique, persistent identifier that undermines user consent mechanisms and that requires a regulatory solution. Similarly, Advertising identifiers are a pervasive tracking tool on mobile platforms that are currently not addressed. The Regulation should use terminology that more accurately captures the targeted behavior, and not only one possible implementation of tracking.

Second, the Regulation includes a particular focus on Web browsers (such as Recitals 22-24), without proper consideration of the diversity of forms of online communications today. We aren’t suggesting that the Regulation exclude Web browsing, of course. But to focus on one particular client-side software technology risks missing other technology with significant privacy implications, such as tracking facilitated by mobile operating systems or cloud services accessed via mobile apps. Keeping a principle-based approach will ensure that the Regulation doesn’t impose a specific solution that does not meaningfully deliver on transparency, choice, and control outside of the Web browsing context.

3 – Browsers are not gatekeepers nor ad-blockers; we are user agents.

Building on the above, the Parliament ought to view the Web browser in a manner that reflects its place in the technology ecosystem. Web browsers are user agents facilitating the communication between internet users and Web sites. For example, Firefox offers deep customisation options, and its goal is to put the user in the driver seat. Similarly, Firefox private browsing mode includes Tracking Protection technology, which blocks certain third party trackers through a blacklist (learn more about our approach to content blocking here). Both of these are user agent features, embedded in code shipped to users and run on their local devices – neither is a service that we functionally intermediate or operate as it is used. It’s not constructive from a regulatory perspective, nor an accurate understanding of the technology, to describe Web browsers as gatekeepers in the way the Regulation does today.