Comment by privacywall | Hacker News Reader

Comment by privacywall | Hacker News Reader

I built PrivacyWall to block all Firefox telemetry urls. It may make your browsing even faster since it blocks all unwanted data collection that happens in the background at the OS level. That means it is more effective than an extension running on top of Firefox, and Firefox cannot surreptitiously send data without your knowledge anymore. If you are working on sensitive projects and this is something you are worried about, I am making it available for free for non-commercial users at http://www.privacywall.org

I received alot of emails from loyal Firefox users telling me they are worried about their privacy when using Firefox 57 after the Looking Glass debacle, so I decided to make it available for free. If there are tracking domains sites you you think should be blocked due to suspicious behavior, tell me the urls and I will evaluate for inclusion. Please feel free to submit it as a comment to this thread or submit it using the form submission field on the PrivacyWall homepage.

So if I'm worried about tracking, I should install some closed-source binary from a site which has no identifiable information so it can control all connections on my computer?

Fun fact: you can turn off telemetry yourself in Firefox. And it's open source, so you (or someone else) can check that it's actually off.

For the sake of Firefox users, I hope you are right. There's been complaints it flips back on after Firefox updates, so your privacy is at the whims of Firefox.

Fun fact: Firefox just pushed out the Looking Glass add-on to users without notice or consent this past weekend.

In the case of it flipping back on, you're at the whims of bugs - just like with all software. If there's any organisation I'd trust, it's Mozilla - if only because if they make mistakes, there is a lot of pressure for them to correct this (case in point: Looking Glass).

Note that Mozilla pushes code without explicit consent for all parts of it all the time - they're called software updates. The problem in this case was that it was for a potential feature that very few people cared for, and that it showed up as a scary extension in the extension list. That definitely should not have happened, but it's not a privacy violation.

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