Mozilla Firefox and its various forks – official or otherwise – have been the go-to web-browsers for privacy conscious netizens for the better part of two decades, and that continues to remain the case even amidst the public outcry about the organization’s plans to introduce advertising to earn more revenues.
The non-profit organization is now working on adding a new dedicated social tracking protection component to the browser’s existing tracker protection system to better protect users from persistent tracking by social media sites. Believed to have been first spotted by BleepingComputer, a Bugzilla post from last month suggests that the browser will soon have a dedicated blocking category named “Social media trackers” for protection from, well, social media trackers.
The social tracking protection is expected to be introduced in Firefox 70, and the initial blacklist will reportedly include trackers from a number of social media sites and associated domains, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Oculus, FB Messenger, WhatsApp, TweetDeck, LinkedIn and YouTube. According to the report, however, although social tracking protection will be enabled by default, “Firefox will not aggressively block all trackers that could break the functionality of a site”.
Official mockups from Mozilla seem to further suggest that the browser will also display a small-pop-up from time-to time after blocking social trackers, cryptominers, fingerprinting and cross-site tracking cookies, as seen in the official mockup below.
While Mozilla has admitted that it’s working on social tracking protection, it says there’s no guarantee that any of these features will ever see the light of day. In a statement to BleepingComputer, the organization said: “Until we make a public announcement or you see it appear in the general release of Firefox or other products, there is no guarantee that an experimental feature or experience will make it into the Firefox product offerings”.
