Why Facebook's claims about the Ad Observer are wrong | The Mozilla Blog

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Abstraction: Mozilla defending Ad Observer political ad transparency research tool

Key points:

Facebook terminated accounts of NYU researchers who built Ad Observer, a browser extension exposing political ad targeting
Mozilla conducted two separate reviews of Ad Observer (code review + consent flow) before recommending it to users
Ad Observer collects only ads, targeting parameters, and metadata — not personal posts, friend data, or user profiles; it is open source
Facebook's action continues a pattern of killing transparency tools: CrowdTangle sidelined, ProPublica/Mozilla tools killed in 2019
Mozilla argues Facebook should create safe harbors for public-interest research, as Mozilla does for its own bug bounty program
Mozilla launched Mozilla Rally as an alternative research platform to bypass unresponsive platforms

Connections: Mozilla · Facebook · New York University · Platform Transparency · Ad Transparency · Disinformation