We’ve already reported Firefox shows protection report at about:protections page with real information on all trackers it blocked so far, these include social media trackers also. Mozilla now wants to display social trackers blocked by Firefox Tracking Protection feature on the active website separately in protection panel with “Social Media Trackers” sub-section.
Tracking Protection in Firefox available via different content block modes such as Standard, Strict and Custom is becoming more powerful. Mozilla already moved Fingerprinters and Cyrptominers to Standard mode in Nightly version to block them by default.
“Privacy Protections” option added to hamburger menu, now takes you to Protections page to report blocked trackers stats and offers Firefox Monitor and Firefox Lokwise sections, which display whether the email address you signed up for breach alerts is part of data breach or not, and the number of passwords synced and stored by Lockwise in Mozilla browser.
The door hanger that opens when you click on the shield icon in Site identity area is called as “Tracking Protection panel”, this has been updated recently to include real data from Privacy Protections.
Social Tracking Protection in Firefox
The social media trackers information is displayed in tracking protection panel when you visit article pages of certain websites that include embedded widgets from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social sites. Firefox by default blocks trackers from these social platforms on websites: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
Here is the notification we’ve received when visited a site that has social widgets or buttons: “Nightly stopped a social network from tracking you here: Your privacy matters. Nightly now blocks common social media trackers, limiting how much data they can collect about what you do online”
Clicking “See Protections” and “Social Media Trackers” after that, reveals us to see which trackers are blocked with below messge:
“Social networks place trackers on other websites to follow what you do, see, and watch online. This allows social media companies to learn more about you beyond what you share on your social media profiles.”
For instance, in the above screenshot, you can see “graph.facebook.com” has been detected and blocked.
Mozilla configured the notification to display the only a couple of times in two days, so you may not get them so many times in a day, we’ve been able to get the social tracking protection feature working by toggling preferences related to social tracking in about:config, can’t say changing below prefs will work for you, but give it a try.
1. Visit about:config
2. Search for “socialtracking” and change below preferences values to true.
privacy.trackingprotection.socialtracking.enabled
privacy.trackingprotection.socialtracking.annotate.enabled
Mozilla planning to turn on Social tracking protection feature by default in Nightly, you can follow this meta bug for developments on the feature.
