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seanhunter

If you want to disable this, instructions are given here[1] but

1) Hamburger menu -> Settings -> Privacy & Security

2) scroll down to the new section entitled "Web Site Advertising Preferences".

3) Make sure the box marked "Allow web sites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement" is not checked.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attr...

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And of course this setting doesn't sync to new devices by default. So you need to remember to opt-out on every device.

The underlying pref is dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled. I'm going to force this off in my policies.

How do you sync these settings across devices? I need such a thing, too.

If you want to use Firefox sync IIUC you can define a new pref services.sync.prefs.sync.dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled. However this has always been flakey in the past for me. (I think maybe the sync prefs themselves don't sync?)

Now I install an organizational policy that sets the prefs. I use NixOS to apply this and it looks like this:

    environment.systemPackages = [(pkgs.firefox.override {
      extraPrefs = ''
        lockPref("dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled", false);
      ''
    })];

I think this is just creating a `prefs.js` file under the hood, so you should be able to replicate on other systems that you manage.

Edit: This is creating a lib/firefox/mozilla.cfg. IDK how exactly this applies to other distros.

Basically, you need to create a `user.js` file in the root folder of your profile, you can find/open the profile folder using about:profiles or about:support (default path is `~/.mozilla/firefox/${profile-name}/user.js`). You can sync it however you like, e.g. upload it to your dotfiles repo and symlink with stow, etc.

The syntax is: user_pref("dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled", false); // Disable Privacy-Preserving Attribution

You can find a lot of examples and "documentation" on https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js

Thanks for providing these instructions. My usual way to get to some setting in Firefox is to use the search box but it seems that Mozilla is actively hiding this one by excluding it from search, ie if you type "advertising" into the settings search box then there are no results.

That is because "Allow web sites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement" doesn't have the word "advertising" in it. Granted the current phrasing a bit awkward and may have a certain degree of deliberateness behind it.

Yes, but the section name "Web Site Advertising Preferences" has the word Advertising in it.

IMO, almost all of the Firefox preferences are phrased awkwardly.

It seems the search matches on the text of the option, not the section text. The text of the option is "Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement" and the search for me brings up the option (and of course anything else that matches) when I search for any of that.

Ah, thanks for pointing that out. I'd expected a match on the section heading :\

Is everything typed into the search box sent to Google by default.

It's great that there is a way to turn it off, but the root problem, again and again, is that it is on by default without obtaining the user's opt-in consent. The company (again) made a unilateral decision about what the software should do, without asking the user. This is such a common, terrible practice of Silicon Valley.

I don't care if the feature cures cancer or gives me a free puppy. I don't want a feature running without my explicitly commanding it to run.

    sudo rm $(which firefox)

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