Mozilla made Firefox better already impressive arsenal of Privacy Conservation Technology Tuesday with the adding a new tool in its flagship browser: Total Cookie Protection. As the name suggests, the feature promises to put the lid on creepy cookies or third-party tracking techniques that seek to track your site-to-site behavior.
Before we get the details of Firefox is the latest feature, and it’s worthwhile to quickly summarize some of them The basic of how cookies actually work. Broadly speaking, the small text strings we call ‘cookies’ have the same purpose in mind: to identify your unique browser session on your unique computer and save the data for later. Depends on the scent cookies, that stored data may be used for one of two things: either to track your behavior on that particular website (first-party cookies) or to track and compile your behavior on different websites (third-party cookies).
It’s a bit complicated to explain how these third-party cookies lurk on the internet (although Mozilla has the finer points of third-party detection in this blog). In a nutshell, the reason these cookies seem to go on and on (and on) is because almost every website you can name undoubtedly has a number of these thirds.party cookies tucked into his margin – and sometimes this is also the case in the thousands. If you happen to visit two websites that use the same third-party code, the company behind that third-party code can not prevent anything from syncing the data for their own stalk-y purposes.
The way this new Firefox feature bypasses all that is actually smart: maintaining a separate ‘cookie pot’ for each website. Again, Mozilla set out to help the nitty-gritty of how it works on its own blog, and promises – in short – that these pots will prevent sneaky third parties from encrypting cookie data from various websites behind the scenes.
This total cookie protection technology is a direct result-to another security update that rolled out to late January, when Mozilla announced that Firefox would now isolate its cache and network connectivity data on a site-by-site basis. Mozilla pointed out at the time that this type of data store could be abused to essentially create a new kind of cookie (literally called a ‘super cookie’), i.e. much harder to shake off.
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It all sounds absolutely wonderful on paper but as we pointed out previously, Firefox’s claims were not always airy. This also applies to his promises about Total Cookie Protection.
To begin with, Mozilla mentions that the feature
make a limited exception on cookies on different websites when they are needed for non-tracking purposes, such as those used by popular third-party login providers.
And that this
does not currently restrict third-party storage access for resources that are not classified as trace resources.
Although the report does not contain the details of what these exceptions look like, this technical document on Mozilla’s developer blog presents some clues.
First, it’s worth noting that Firefox’s definition of what a ‘tracker’ might actually be nouer than you would like to do think. Because there is literally thousands players in the ever-growing adtech ecosystem, and because the list of trackers that use Firefox (which you can see for yourself here) is relatively short in comparison, inevitably, people who use Firefox may see a cookie or two slipping under the Firefox radar – and following it on the Internet – simply because the cookie is not under Firefox’s definition of a ‘cookie’. ‘does not fall. .
And once these trackers fall by the wayside, they’re free to access their cookies and other website storage, and use the identifiers to track users on multiple websites – at least for now. According to Mozilla’s development blog, the company may choose ‘in the future’ to apply additional restrictions on third-party storage access’, even for widgets that are not necessarily classified as’ trackers’ under Mozilla’s strict definition.
Apart from this obscure definition, there is also the fact that Firefox gives certain third party instruments unrestricted access to multiple sites as a way to ‘break sites’. The greatest sinner here, as Mozilla pointed out, is single sign up (SSO) services, also known as the buttons that allow you to sign in to a website with your Facebook or Google account. Not for nothing, but considering how these two companies kind of faint reputation On the privacy front, I would rather not give them – or their login widgets – a free pass.
But we give Firefox credit. No browser is perfect. Even if Mozilla falls a little short on its privacy promises, at least it’s not Google Chrome.