Firefox and the Illusion of Privacy

Some nominal observations about the Mozilla folks claiming to be advocates for privacy.

Search engine owners pay to have Firefox use their search engine. Search engine owners make money through advertising, which is dependent upon tracking users and mining data. Pretty much a conflict of interest right there.

Cookies are enabled by default. In Preferences->Privacy, the ability to configure a cookies white list is hidden by default. Users must know to enable the Use custom settings for history option.

After enabling the Cookies option users will notice that accepting all cookies is enabled by default and accepting third party cookies is enabled. Third party cookies are used solely for tracking and data mining.

Upcoming Firefox releases might require an add-on to manage individual cookies.

JavaScript is enabled by default with no GUI control to toggle. Without add-ons there is no way to create a JavaScript white list.

Tiles (speed dial) expose browsing history.

Cliqz recommendations.

Pocket sponsored recommendations.

The following hidden preferences are enabled by default:

    beacon.enabled
    browser.safebrowsing.enabled
    browser.safebrowsing.downloads.enabled
    browser.safebrowsing.malware.enabled
    browser.pocket.enabled
    browser.send_pings
    camera.control.autofocus_moving_callback.enabled
    camera.control.face_detection.enabled
    clipboard.autocopy
    device.sensors.enabled
    dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled
    dom.webnotifications.enabled
    experiments.enabled
    extensions.pocket.enabled
    geo.enabled
    media.navigator.enabled
    media.peerconnection.enabled
    narrate.enabled
    network.http.sendRefererHeader
    network.http.sendSecureXSiteReferrer
    network.predictor.enabled
    network.prefetch-next
    social.enabled
    webgl.disabled=false

This short list does not touch upon intrusions to privacy with built-in system add-ons. System add-ons cannot be removed.

The observations do not imply these features might be useful for some people, but that they violate privacy when users are not fully informed. All of these hidden features should have GUI controls in the Preferences Privacy section. There are no GUI controls without a respective add-on.

In the Preferences->Privacy section, there should be a way to remove or disable all of these options. Something like a Strict Privacy section. Developers could add another belittling confirmation dialog if they wanted. No, this option is not a Private Browsing Window. This option would remove or disable all of the above options.

Yeah, I know the standard replies. “Enabling these features is necessary to provide a rich web browser experience.” Or, “Disabling some of these features breaks certain web sites and services.”

Posted: March 09, 2018 Category: Usability Tagged: Firefox

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