Mozilla makes 'tracking protection' the default on Firefox for iOS
As the good citizens of the internet become more and more woke as to how little of our activity online is truly private, Mozilla Firefox wants to step up as the browser for privacy-oriented people.
Mozilla announced in a blog post on Thursday that default "tracking protection" is rolling out in Firefox for iOS. That means browsing done on iPhone and iPad devices will be automatically blocked from pixel tracking — which allows advertisers, and, oh, Facebook, to collect data on which websites you visit and products you view.
The announcement comes just a day after Mark Zuckerberg faced five hours of questioning in the House of Representatives about user privacy and data monitoring. Zuckerberg had some of his squirmier moments when he came under fire for this practice of monitoring individual activity outside of Facebook in particular.
On Mozilla's Firefox browser, tracking protection has been available for desktop browsing for a while. The tool allows Firefox users to toggle tracking protection on and off, and it also has a feature that displays whether any given website actually contains tracking elements. Take that, Zuck.
This is just the latest announcement from the non-profit that claims to champion privacy, and specifically guard against the long reach of Facebook. In March, Mozilla released a browser extension called the Facebook Container, which isolates user activity seen by Facebook to — gasp — JUST Facebook dot com. Mozilla also pulled its advertising from Facebook shortly after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, because Mozilla was not satisfied with Facebook's default privacy settings for its users.
According to ZDNet, Firefox is the fourth most-used browser, behind Chrome, Safari, and (ugh) Internet Explorer. But with renewed concern over privacy and individual control over one's data, maybe these standings are ready for a shake-up.
Topics Cybersecurity Facebook
