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CCPA in effect – Mozilla firefox will let users delete their collected data

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The California Consumer Privacy Act came into effect on Wednesday, Jan 1. Being obliged by the new privacy law, the maker of Firefox web browser Mozilla announced that to give more control to users over their data.

CCPA provides California residents the right to know what personal data is being collected by the companies and for which purpose. Moreover, the users have the right to ask the companies to delete their collected data. According to Mozilla, the changes it is making won’t be just for California residents, but all Firefox users. 

These new changes will be applicable to the release of the new browser version, which is scheduled for the coming Tuesday, i.e. January 7 as written by Mozilla in its blog post

“In line with the work we’ve done this year to make privacy easier and more accessible to our users, the deletion control will be built into Firefox and will begin rolling out in the next version of the browser on January 7. For Firefox, privacy is not optional. We don’t think people should have to choose between the technology they love and their privacy. We think you should have both. That’s why we are taking these steps to bring additional protection to all our users under CCPA.”

Though Firefox doesn’t collect any data of the users form visited websites or search queries, it let users delete telemetry data (e.g. session time or the number of tabs opened). This data is collected just to improve the performance and security of the browser. 

Since it is not worth to create two separate interfaces and policies for the browser’s users in different states, companies may follow suit of Mozilla, including Microsoft. Moreover, other states have also started considering laws similar to CCPA which may be applicable in the near future and could extend beyond California.