Credit: Corbin Davenport / Mozilla

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Mozilla has announced that its new Firefox 145 update is rolling out major privacy upgrades designed to fight browser fingerprinting. This will basically lower the number of users trackable by this insidious method by half, making things a lot more secure for the user.

For those who don’t know the term, fingerprinting is basically a hidden tracking technique that is far more invasive than standard cookies. It works by building a secret digital ID of you based on subtle details of your device setup. This information ranges from your time zone settings and your operating system configuration to the specific fonts you have installed.

When all these details are collected together, they create a unique “fingerprint” that websites can use to identify you consistently across different sites and even across different browsing sessions. This means that even if you block cookies or use your browser’s private mode, fingerprinters can still track your activity for months without your knowledge or consent. This is awful for everyone because it doesn’t ask for your permission; it just does it.

Firefox has had Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) for years, and features like Total Cookie Protection. However, the browser has been improving its own anti-fingerprinting protections by focusing on the most common pieces of information collected by suspected trackers. With these expanded fingerprinting defenses, browsing should get much safer.

This new rollout specifically targets fingerprinters that manage to track you across your browsing sessions but aren’t yet on any known tracker lists. Apparently, Mozilla drew from a global analysis of how real people’s browsers are being fingerprinted in the wild. This helped the team develop unique defenses against real-world techniques.

Beyond just blocking known tracking and fingerprinting scripts as part of ETP, Firefox also limits the sheer amount of information it makes available to websites in the first place. Browsers need to give some information to websites to use legitimate features, like sharing your graphics hardware specs, so that a game can optimize its performance. Trackers, however, also ask for that same information simply to help build a unique fingerprint of your device.

Firefox is stopping websites from knowing specific hardware details, like the number of cores your processor has, how many simultaneous fingers your touchscreen supports, and even the precise dimensions of your dock or taskbar. These details may seem like they don’t matter, but it’s the combination of details that gives the fingerprint a good idea of what you are using and who you are.

Mozilla says that its improvements cut the percentage of users seen as unique by almost half. It’s hard to do something like this because you need to strike a balance. You can’t completely disrupt fingerprinters because you also need to be able to use the web. More aggressive blocking might sound better on paper, but it is guaranteed to break legitimate website features.

For example, calendar tools, scheduling apps, and conferencing software legitimately need to know your real time zone to function correctly. Firefox targets the most leaky fingerprinting tricks and scripts used by trackers to keep things as legitimate as possible.

I definitely recommend upgrading to the new Firefox release or download the browser from its website to get better privacy.

Source: Mozilla Blog