Most of us are probably annoyed by the fact that the websites we visit have cookies that follow us around wherever we go on the Internet. But a lot of people also don’t know that most browsers now have tools to help you block those cookies and other things like cryptomining. Now Mozilla wants to help you out by turning on its Firefox Enhanced Tracking Protection by default so you don’t have to manually enable it and you automatically get that special protection.
The Firefox Enhanced Tracking Protection was actually enabled for new users last June 2019 and since then, they have tested and refined it to further protect the privacy and security of its users. And now they are confident enough that they are automatically turning it on for users so that it will be able to block the third-party tracking cookies by default. As of the moment, a little over 20% of Firefox users have Enhanced Tracking Protection already enabled.
If you see a shield icon in your address bar, that means it’s already turned on for you. That means that they’re already blocking “thousands of companies” from seeing your online activity and also being able to follow you on your social media. You can also see a list of these companies by clicking on the shield icon, going to the Content Blocking section and then Cookies. If you click on the arrow on the right-hand side, you’ll see the list of companies they have blocked.
In case you want to turn off blocking for a specific site, there is a “Turn off Blocking for this Site” button. Blocking crypto miners is also now included in the Standard Mode of your Content Blocking preferences. If you also want to turn off Fingerprinting scripts which can also be used to track your activity across the web, you can turn on the Strict Mode. Later on, blocking this kind of script will also be turned on by default.
Automatically enabling these kinds of protection for your online activity is pretty useful since not everyone knows about things like this or not everyone wants to go through the trouble of enabling them one by one. You can check out Firefox if it’s not yet your default browser but privacy and security are important to you.
