browser

Online Privacy

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.

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Firefox 69 Brings ‘Privacy’ To The Forefront

Firefox Logo

Firefox had lost its charm since I personally began using it in the last decade but I have started using it since last year and loving the experience. Especially since it was always known to embrace the values of ‘online privacy’. It’s not that the topic of online privacy wasn’t around but since the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal blew up on our face it’s now taken centre stage in our lives. Now all of a sudden there has been a renewed interest in online privacy, securing browsing, ad tracking, and harder as it seems for companies, they are convincing their customers that their data is kept safe and not lost to some maniacal coding or business practice. Well, I’m happy that Mozilla has taken the lead in online privacy protection for others to take suit — I’m expecting at least Apple to reinforce Safari.

Firefox took an exemplary leap this week on the protection of users’ privacy with their latest update (Firefox 69) effectively making ‘privacy’ the centrepiece of its development process with a slew of features including limiting the use of Flash has been introduced, an archaic piece of program which I sincerely thought was gone, dead or buried forever but I was so wrong.

  • 100% of users now get the Enhanced Tracking Protection, working behind the scenes it keeps a company from forming a profile of the user based on the tracking of their browsing behaviour across websites often without knowledge or consent.
  • An option for blocking crypto miners was introduced in previous versions of Firefox Nightly and Beta but it’s now included in the ‘Standard Mode‘ of the Content blocking preferences today. There’s also a feature which blocks Fingerprinting scripts who harvest a snapshot of your computer’s configuration when you visit a website. This feature is not currently enabled by default (Preferences > Privacy & Security > Content Blocking > Enable Strict mode).
  • The “Always Activate” option for Flash plugin content has been removed. Firefox will now always ask for user permission before activating Flash content on a website.

A much-awaited ‘Block Autoplay’ feature has been released giving users the right to block audio and video. But the most noteworthy feature has come for Mac users in terms of battery-saving. Firefox, I sincerely believe, has finally come to rule the browser wars.

Microsoft buys out Firefox?

Atleast that’s what this website wants us to believe. It’s offering a browser called Microsoft Firefox 2007 for download along with a complete feature list! The design looks much similar to Microsoft’s IE 7 spotlight. Even the favicon is similar to Microsoft’s. So shall we term it as a website rip, an attempted phishing or simply a figment of somebody’s wild illusions? you can decide for yourself. But IE married off with Firefox is a dangerous proposition to even imagine :-)