How to enable Redirect Tracking Protection in Firefox

[Karlston]

How to enable Redirect Tracking Protection in Firefox

Mozilla released Firefox 79.0 to the stable channel recently and one of the main changes of that release improved the browser's tracking protection feature.

 

Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0 introduced support for preventing an advanced tracking technique called redirect tracking. Redirect Tracking is used to bypass a browser's mechanisms to block online tracking. While browser's may block third-party cookies, redirect tracking basically adds the tracker's site to the navigational event to make it first party in the context.

 

So, instead of visiting Site B from Site A right away, you would be taken to Site T as well (Site A > Site T > Site with T being the tracker site. Site T would just load briefly and then redirect to the actual target.

 

Mozilla notes on its developer site:

Redirect trackers work by forcing you to make an imperceptible and momentary stopover to their website as part of that journey. So instead of navigating directly from the review website to the retailer, you’ll end up navigating to the redirect tracker first rather than to the retailer. This means that the tracker is loaded as a first party. The redirect tracker associates tracking data with the identifiers they have stored in their first-party cookies and then forwards you to the retailer.

 

Firefox's redirect tracking protection clears cookies and site data from trackers regularly provided that the preference network.cookie.cookieBehavior is set to the value 4 or 5.

 

You can check the value of the preference by loading about:config in the browser's address bar and searching for the preference. Mozilla will introduce support for the values 1 and 3 in Firefox 80. Firefox users may configure the browser's tracking protection feature on about:preferences#privacy.

 

Firefox will clear the following data associated with the tracking attempt:

• Network cache and image cache
• Cookies
• AppCache
• DOM Quota Storage (localStorage, IndexedDB, ServiceWorkers, DOM Cache, etc.)
• DOM Push notifications
• Reporting API Reports
• Security Settings (i.e. HSTS)
• EME Media Plugin Data
• Plugin Data (e.g. Flash)
• Media Devices
• Storage Access permissions granted to the origin
• HTTP Authentication Tokens
• HTTP Authentication Cache

Origins will only be cleared if they met the following conditions:

• If it stored or accessed site storage within the last 72 hours.
• The origin is classified as a tracker by Mozilla's Tracking Protection list.
• No origin with the same base domain has a user-interaction permission.
  • Permissions are granted for 45 days if a user interacts with the top-level document, e.g. by scrolling.

Data is cleared when the user has been idle for 1 minute (>48 hours after the last purge) or 3 minutes (24-48 hours after the last purge).

Manage Redirect Tracking Protection in Firefox

 

Redirect tracking protection is rolled out over the next two weeks to all Firefox users. The feature is controlled by a preference that Firefox users may set right away to enable the protection.

 

Enable Redirect Tracking Protection in Firefox:

• Load about:config in the browser's address bar.
• Search for privacy.purge_trackers.enabled.
• Set the preference to TRUE to enable it, or FALSE to disable it.
• Search for network.cookie.cookieBehavior.
• Make sure it is set to 4 or 5 in Firefox 79, and 1,3,4 or 5 in Firefox 80).
• Restart the web browser.

Check out the post on Mozilla's developer site for additional information.

 

 

How to enable Redirect Tracking Protection in Firefox

 

[funkyy]

I always wondered how I had cookies from sites that I never knowingly visited.

This explains why. This afternoon I configured Firefox as per the instructions.