Mozilla strengthened Firefox already impressive arsenal of technology that preserves privacy on Tuesday with the adding a new tool to your flagship browser: Total Cookie Protection. As its name suggests, the feature promises to put the lid on any creepy cookie or third-party tracking technology that can track your behavior from one place to another.
Before going into the specific details of Last feature of Firefox, it’s worth quickly summarizing some of them the basics of how cookies really work. Broadly speaking, small strings of text that we call “cookies” serve the same purpose: to identify the unique session of the browser on the single computer and to store this data for later. Depending on the taste of the cookies involved, that the stored data could be used for one of two things: tracking your behavior on that particular website (own cookies) or tracking and compiling your behavior on several different sites (third-party cookies).
Explaining how these third-party cookies trap you across the web is a bit tricky (although Mozilla detailed the finer points of third-party tracking in this blog). Simply put, the reason these cookies seem to persist (and also) is because almost every site you can name certainly has a certain number of these third parties.party cookies stored in their margins and sometimes that number is in thousands. If you visit two sites that use the same third-party code bit, there’s nothing stopping the company behind the third-party code from syncing that data for their own purposes.
The way this new feature of Firefox eludes everything that is really very smart: keeping a separate “cookie jar” for each site. Once again, Mozilla sketched usefully the crisp ones of how this works on your own blog and promises, in short, that these pots will prevent third parties from pasting cookie data from multiple sites behind the scenes.
This total protection of cookies the technology is a direct follow-upUntil another security update that released towards in late January, when Mozilla announced that Firefox would now isolate cache and network connection data by website. Mozilla noted at the time that this type of data store could be abused to create essentially a new type of cookie (literally called “supercookies”). much harder to shake.
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That all sounds totally fantastic on paper, though as we have pointed out before, Firefox’s claims weren’t always airtight. This also applies to their promises of Total Cookie Protection.
For starters, Mozilla mentions this feature
makes a limited exception for cross-site cookies when they are needed for non-crawling purposes, such as those used by popular third-party login providers.
And this
does not currently restrict access to third-party storage for resources that are not classified as tracking resources.
Although the publication does not go into the details of what these exceptions look like, this technical document on the Mozilla developer blog offers some clues.
First, it’s worth noting that it may be Firefox’s definition of what a crawler actually is. narrower of what you would do to think. Because there is literally thousands of growing adtech ecosystem players and for the list of crawlers that Firefox uses (which you can see for yourself) here) is relatively short compared to, inevitably, people using Firefox can see one or two cookies slipping under Firefox’s radar — and tracking them over the web — just because that cookie didn’t fit the definition of Firefox than it could be a “cookie”. .
And once these crawlers are left out, they can freely access their cookies and other site storage and use those identifiers to track users of multiple sites, at least for now. According to Mozilla’s development block, the company “may choose to apply additional restrictions on third-party storage access in the future,” even for widgets that are not necessarily classified as “crawlers” by definition. strict Mozilla.
Aside from that murky definition, there’s also the fact that Firefox gives certain third-party tools free access to multiple sites as a way to “avoid breaking websites.” The biggest culprit here, as Mozilla pointed out, is single sign-on (SSO) services, also known as the buttons that allow you to sign in to a site using your Facebook or Google account. Not in vain, but considering how these two companies have a kind of little reputation in terms of privacy, I’d rather not give them a free pass or their login widgets.
But we give credit to Firefox. No browser is perfect. Although Mozilla does not keep its promises of privacy, at least it is not Google Chrome.