Firefox telemetry and data collection denial

[sunrat]

Just found this interesting and vast guide to reducing outgoing tracking data from Firefox. It's in the form of a user.js file which you could deploy altogether, or select particular items and edit them with about:config. Firefox does appear to send various data out and most of us probably don't need the functionality this data supports. Who ever used "Pocket" for instance?

 

https://gist.github.com/MrYar/751e0e5f3f1430db7ec5a8c8aa237b72

[securitybreach]

Neat stuff, thanks.

 

I always disabled Pocket out of the box anyway.

 

Speak of, I got this email the other day from Mozilla: Firefox protects your privacy in every product

 

[sunrat]

1 hour ago, securitybreach said:

Speak of, I got this email the other day from Mozilla: Firefox protects your privacy in every product

 

Started doing that in FF70 I think. I'm still going to keep Privacy Badger anyway.

[securitybreach]

3 minutes ago, sunrat said:

 

Started doing that in FF70 I think. I'm still going to keep Privacy Badger anyway.

 

Of course. Plus ghostery, ublock origin, decentraleyes and canvas blocker

[sunrat]

I used to have Ghostery but replaced it with Privacy Badger. uBlock Origin is great. I doubt canvas blocking is great though, see this - https://multilogin.com/how-canvas-fingerprint-blockers-make-you-easily-trackable/

[securitybreach]

I also use Privacy Badger as well as ghostery and the others. I also now have Disconnect

[sunrat]

1 hour ago, securitybreach said:

I also use Privacy Badger as well as ghostery and the others. I also now have Disconnect

 

Three tracker blockers? Your tinfoil hat is on too tight!

[zlim]

sunrat, thanks for the link to the informative article.

 

I dislike depending on an unknown file to make changes so I'll be studying what changes I can manually make myself and taking notes so I can undo what I dislike. This might take me a few days to go through everything. I'm cautuious and only make 1 or 2 changes at a time and test how things work.

 

Who knows, it might speed up my FF ESR. I switched from FF to Palemoon as my default browser simply because it is so much faster.

[securitybreach]

2 minutes ago, zlim said:

Who knows, it might speed up my FF ESR. I switched from FF to Palemoon as my default browser simply because it is so much faster.

 

What do you mean by speed? I have not ever noticed firefox or chrome slowing down.

[ebrke]

I definitely noticed FF slowing down on mother's win7 laptop in the sense that it took ages to start up for the first time each day. There was also some showing down of loading web pages in general. Both seem to have improved. Two things happened almost at the same time: FF updated to another version and I updated ESET Internet Security to newest version, so I can't say which event may have brought about the improvement.

Edited November 7, 2019 by ebrke

[securitybreach]

Well that could be a lack of ram, something on windows 7 running in the background that was taking up system resources, etc. Even on a powerful system, windows hiccups for no apparent reason. We always chalk it up to poor programming.