Mozilla has announced that it plans to abide by the new California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) on a worldwide scale in the new year, not just for those based in the western U.S. state. For those that haven’t been tracking CCPA, it’s a new law that gives Californians more privacy protections, similar to what Europeans have with the GDPR. The CCPA comes into effect on January 1, 2020.
With the CCPA in place, the Attorney General of Califonia is allowed to enforce privacy protections, those in California can also sue companies not handling their data in accordance with the law. Under CCPA, users in California can ask companies what personal information is being collected, gain access to it, update and correct it, delete it, find out who it’s being shared with, and opt-out of its sale to third-parties.
In the announcement, Mozilla said it already collects very little data about its users; in an upcoming update, however, Mozilla plans to give users the ability to delete their telemetry data from Mozilla’s servers. In Firefox, telemetry only gives Mozilla general information such as how many tabs were open and how long they’re open for; the company can’t tell what sites you’re on and doesn’t collect any data while you’re in private browsing mode.
In the next browser update on January 7, users will be able to find a control to delete their telemetry data. For the time being, this feature sounds as though it will only be available in the desktop version of the browser, but knowing Mozilla, the mobile version will probably gain the feature sooner or later.