Mozilla has planned to turn on Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0 for everyone with recent Firefox 79 release but decided otherwise and today, the company announced it will roll out the feature over the next two weeks. But you can enable Redirect tracking Protection today in Firefox before Mozilla, here is how.
Mozilla promises it will protect Firefox users from redirect trackers without users need to configure anything in the browser.
Redirect tracking, a new technique found by advertisers to track users that bypasses Firefox’s third-party cookie blocking successfully.
Since the introduction of ETP, ad industry technology has found other ways to track users: creating workarounds and new ways to collect your data in order to identify you as you browse the web. Redirect tracking goes around Firefox’s built-in third-party cookie-blocking policy by passing you through the tracker’s site before landing on your desired website. This enables them to see where you came from and where you are going.
This has been brought to UBlock Origin developer notice recently, he updated UBO to block first-party tracking cookies. As of now, the DNS API is supported by Firefox only.
With new ETP 2.0 in place, Firefox checks to “see if cookies and site data from those trackers need to be deleted every day” and clears cookies and site data from tracking sites every 24 hours.
Enable Redirect Tracking Protection in Firefox
- Launch Firefox browser
- Visit about:config
- Search for “purge” and change the below preference value to true
privacy.purge_trackers. enabled 
- Restart the browser.
Related articles:
Firefox 70: Mozilla updates Enhanced Tracking Protection Preferences
Firefox Preview 3.0 beta for Android enables Enhanced Tracking Protection for all Users
On FF 80, there’s also privacy.purge_trackers.consider_entity_list which is set to ‘false’ and privacy.purge_trackers.logging.level which is set to ‘error’ and privacy.purge_trackers.max_purge_count which is set to ‘100’.
Do these need to be amended as well?