Last year, Mozilla introduced a new feature called Enhanced Tracking Protection ( ETP ), which aims to improve privacy and prevent web activity tracking by targeting cookies.
Cookies, generally stored on the user's device in the form of small text files, allow website developers to store user data to facilitate navigation and enable certain functions.
With its ETP function, Mozilla blocks third-party cookies, that is, cookies placed on the user's computer by a server of a domain independent of the one of the visited site.
These cookies are generally used by advertisers to offer you targeted advertising thanks to the advertising profile.
Privacy concerns, such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal on Facebook, justify the development of such features.
Of course, controlling browser cookies doesn't fix everything, but it can help solve some of the privacy problem by preventing businesses from tracking you more easily from one website to another.
About the new version of Firefox 67.0.1
With the arrival of the new version of Firefox 67.0.1, the ETP feature will now be enabled by default in all new installations to make it more difficult for over a thousand companies to track browser users when they browse the Internet.
This feature will be enabled by default for new users who install and download Firefox for the first time; enhanced tracking protection is automatically enabled as part of the browser's "Standard" settings and blocks third-party tracking cookies.
For existing users, enhanced protection against default tracking will be rolled out in the coming months. But if you can't wait, you can activate it manually.
Since you can still disable this feature or simply disable blocking of a specific site, as this can cause some sites to not work properly.
Although you can also choose the different levels of blocking. Mozilla allows users to choose from different standard, strict, and custom options to control their level of online tracking.
Facebook Container is updated
In addition to enabling enhanced tracking protection by default, Mozilla has updated other privacy features.
This is the case with Facebook Container. Launched in late March 2018 in response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, this is a Firefox extension that aims to make it much harder for Facebook to track you when you're not on their site.
This tool, as its name implies, isolates Facebook from the rest of your web browsing activity, which should prevent the social network from following the user to any part of the web.
Facebook Container is an implementation of contextual tab or container technology that Mozilla has been working on for several years and whose production was carried out ahead of schedule in response to the growing demand for tools that would help to better adjust the parameters of Confidentiality and security.
The container tabs allow browsing under different identities with a reduced risk of tracking, by eliminating the exchange of the user's personal data between tabs of different "contexts".
With the arrival of this latest update from Mozilla to the Firefox web browser , version 67.0.1, Facebook Container, which has had more than two million downloads since its launch, prevents Facebook from tracking you on other sites with integrated Facebook features, such as the "Share" and "Like" buttons implemented on millions of websites.
For example, when you're on a news site and reading an article, you often see the "Like" and "Share" buttons for Facebook. The Facebook container will block these buttons and all connections to Facebook's servers , so the social network can't track your visits to these sites. This blocking makes it much harder for Facebook to create user profiles.