Moving to Firefox! (Ahoy Internet Safety!)

Over the past few years, since the surge in social media and online advertising, the Internet has experienced a formidable transformation in the way users have become easy targets only for accessing knowledge/information electronically. The Internet has irrevocably lost its fundamental characteristics as a democratic medium of expression and individuality not just for its utilization by the consumers (the users) but also for companies who are engaged in analytics and data mining in how they are using that personal information unbeknownst to the users. Speaking for myself, I began to feel an urge to monitor my online activities and decide not just the frequency but the amount of personally identifiable information that we willingly share electronically so moving into that direction I have made Firefox a part of my digital lifestyle since the second half of 2019.

Facebook-Cambridge Analytica & Personal Data

According to me, the last straw in this tragic saga came during the early part of 2018 when the lid over the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal was blown and the blatant misuse of personal data of some 50 million Facebook users as part of Cambridge Analytica’s political consulting work became clearer, including its influence on voters during President Trump’s 2016 campaign. As part of the fallout, Facebook suspended the company for violation of its terms of service but the damage had already been done 1. Gathering data on Facebook wasn’t reaping any real benefit in that Cambridge Analytica wasn’t able to fully capture the personality of every single voter, so they worked with researchers to develop “a 120-question survey that seeks to probe personality,” said Alexander Nix, the suspended CEO of Cambridge Analytica. “And we’ve rolled this out to literally hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people across America.” ² The company asked all sorts of questions about the individual’s behaviour and personality and scored people on traits like openness, extroversion and agreeableness, that gets mixed together with polls, voter records and most importantly, online activity, to create personality models to talk to voters in order to persuade voters to vote in a certain pattern, for a certain candidate. If it wasn’t for this scandal, in particular, I would have never learned the critical nature of ‘online activities’ and the susceptibility of our human tendencies to undermine the role of data mining and creating personality traits by behind the ‘cloak’ to induce a certain kind of behaviour. Again, if it wasn’t for the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal the discussion around privacy and privacy laws and regulations would have lost its urgent need. But this isn’t going to stop the companies in their tracks and adopt stronger privacy regulations, the onus is on the individuals to nurture their individuality and yet not get lost in this new-age Internet labyrinth.

Digital Tracking

There is another devil that worried me in this narrative of privacy which is ‘digital tracking’ or websites that track your browsing activity covertly. In most cases, it’s simply because they want to make your browsing experience faster and more convenient which I understand, but on the flip side, this data could be used to determine your browsing habits and your preferences. For instance, sites like YouTube and Netflix collect information on the videos you watch and suggest more videos that you might like. This way they keep you hooked on to the content and the website for a longer time. Similarly, it helps e-commerce sites like Amazon to suggest more products based on tracking your online behaviour while in all this, the advertisers who would be tracking you all the while would use this information to decide what ads to show as you jump from one website to another.

Basically, when using the Internet you leave a record of the websites you visited with everything you click and most websites leave a tracking cookie which is a small piece of data that it uses to know your online behaviour. Generally, these cookies aren’t malicious and do not pose a threat to your online security but if you don’t like the idea about websites collecting personal information in a clandestine way and following you with their ads wherever you go there are options available to block such cookies. ³ But it’s not just cookies that are used to track each and every move you make online, in fact, there are companies who can analyze location data silently emitted by the cellphones, smartphones and other electronic devices that we carry every day. They harness the unique identifier linked to the cellphones and create a pattern of places the person frequents, and so on. ⁴ The story becomes frighteningly scary from here on so we will stick to online privacy for now.

Moving to Firefox

Long story short, if you’re someone who’s concerned about online privacy and how your personal data is being misused I insist that you switch to Firefox. I was a Chrome addict for the longest amount of time and I don’t remember a time in the last 5 years when I haven’t used Chrome despite knowing the fact that Google was admittedly collecting personal data as part of their business model.

“Google does a good job of protecting your data from hackers, protecting you from phishing, making it easier to zero out your search history or go incognito,” says Douglas Schmidt, a computer science researcher at Vanderbilt University who has studied Google’s user data collection and retention policies. “But their business model is to collect as much data about you as possible and cross-correlate it so they can try to link your online persona with your offline persona. This tracking is just absolutely essential to their business. ‘Surveillance capitalism’ is a perfect phrase for it.” ⁵

I’ve experimented with Firefox previously but only as an alternative to Chrome and the other browsers I was using from the designing and development perspective, not as a full replacement for online browsing. However, in 2019, Mozilla decided to make users’ privacy its core philosophy for Firefox’s improvement and I did not look further. Mainly because there’s very little to choose between the two browsers, both have add-ons and extensions that work seamlessly, they synchronize across devices and have built-in password managers. Firefox though is optimized for memory usage and it’s managed by the Mozilla project, while Google owns Chrome. Weighing my options vis-a-vis my online privacy I thought it was time to say goodbye to Chrome.

Firefox Features & Tools

There are a bunch of privacy protection add-ons and features that come bundled with the base Firefox installation. While it’s not surprising considering that Firefox has become the centrepiece for online privacy for the community at large, the browser itself blocks 5 kinds of trackers, such as Social Media Trackers, Cross-Site Tracking Cookies, Tracking Content, Fingerprinters, and Cryptominers. Some of them I was totally unaware of, however, here’s my rundown of some key add-ons and features which you should consider when you decide to take Firefox for a test-drive:

Firefox Monitor

Arguably the most impressive feature I found on the browser, Firefox Monitor notifies you if any of your online accounts have been hacked or compromised by security breaches. For instance, you used an email ID such as you.me@email.com to create an account on a movie website, you provide this email to Monitor and it will look for breaches and notify you accordingly. It’s super smart and very effective to secure your online presence.

Firefox Multi-Account Containers

I cannot but stress enough upon the grave danger posed by browser tracking. Imagine you visit Amazon and check several options of perfume brands but don’t make a purchase. You now move to a news website and see an add to purchase perfume on the sidebar. Next, you move to a different side and lo and behold! Another banner for a perfume brand. In layman’s terms, this is called ‘digital tracking’. It’s the tracking cookies that are covertly dropped in the browser cache that websites use to track your behaviour and serve you those pestering adverts.

Firefox Multi-Account Containers can limit the cookies and other online tracking components to a specific container. For instance, you could have a container for ‘Google’ where all your search queries which could be used by tracking cookies to track you online are stored and limited only to Google. You could create several of those containers and define them based on your accounts or online behaviour or simply use the default ones.

DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials

Somehow when we think about the Internet the first thing that comes to our mind is ‘Google’, in the sense, we are clueless about what we need from the Internet so we launch Google and begin searching for information. But according to DuckDuckGo (DDG), a search engine that protects the searcher’s privacy, Google trackers have been found on 75% of the top million websites which means they track which websites you visit and use that data for ads that follow you around the Internet.⁶ One way to stop Google in its tracks is to use the Multi-Account container or use DuckDuckGo as your default search engine. But that’s not all. The DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials is an add-on that helps you to protect your personal information as you move around on the Internet.

There are plenty more, such as the uBlock Origin and the Cookie AutoDelete that’d serve you right in protecting your personal information online. Even without these add-ons, the basic Firefox installation is safe enough to be used for preventing those pesky trackers to stalk you online. You can never be sure what other technologies might be there to steal your personal information without letting you know, although we can only manage our online habits and choose the right tools for browsing the web.

Sergey Zolkin