Mar 01, 2021, 18:12 pm
(This post was last modified: Mar 01, 2021, 18:15 pm by Resurgence. Edited 1 time in total.)
With the release of Firefox 86, Mozilla offers the usual round of bug fixes and under-the-hood updates, one being very important for your privacy - stricter cookie separation, which Mozilla is branding Total Cookie Protection.
In the Firefox 85 release, Mozilla introduced cache partitioning—a scheme which makes it more difficult for third parties to figure out where you have and have not been on the Internet. Firefox 86 ups the ante again, with TCP.
In a nutshell, Total Cookie Protection restricts the ability of third parties to monitor your movement around the Web using embedded elements such as scripts or iframes. This prevents tracking cookies from Facebook, Amazon, et al. from "following you around the web."
In theory, cookies were already strictly per-site—so amazon.com cannot set or read cookies belonging to facebook.com, and vice versa. But in practice, if amazon.com willingly embeds active Facebook elements in its site, the user's browser treats those elements as belonging to Facebook itself. That means Facebook can set the value of a cookie while you're browsing amazon.com, then read that value again later when you're actually on Facebook (or when you're on other, entirely unrelated sites which also embed Facebook content).
Total Cookie Protection creates separate "cookie jars" based on the identity of the URL actually present in the address bar. With this feature enabled, a Facebook script running at amazon.com can still set and read a Facebook cookie—but that cookie lives within the amazon.com cookie jar only. When the same user browses facebook.com directly, later, Facebook cannot read, write, or even detect the presence of a Facebook cookie within the amazon.com cookie jar, or vice versa.
This isn't a panacea against tracking, by any means—for example, it does nothing to prevent scripts from Facebook, Amazon, et al. from uploading data about your Web travels to their own servers to profile you there. But it at least keeps them from using your own computer's storage to do the dirty work for them.
![[Image: M2iyLCHP_o.png]](https://images2.imgbox.com/66/6e/M2iyLCHP_o.png)
How to Enable the Protection:
Edit>Preferences>Privacy & Security Tab
Under Browser Privacy - Enhanced Tracking Protection, select the Strict profile.
![[Image: 62UqKaqE_o.png]](https://images2.imgbox.com/ab/55/62UqKaqE_o.png)
![[Image: d6g34c27_o.png]](https://images2.imgbox.com/d1/fd/d6g34c27_o.png)
In the Firefox 85 release, Mozilla introduced cache partitioning—a scheme which makes it more difficult for third parties to figure out where you have and have not been on the Internet. Firefox 86 ups the ante again, with TCP.
In a nutshell, Total Cookie Protection restricts the ability of third parties to monitor your movement around the Web using embedded elements such as scripts or iframes. This prevents tracking cookies from Facebook, Amazon, et al. from "following you around the web."
In theory, cookies were already strictly per-site—so amazon.com cannot set or read cookies belonging to facebook.com, and vice versa. But in practice, if amazon.com willingly embeds active Facebook elements in its site, the user's browser treats those elements as belonging to Facebook itself. That means Facebook can set the value of a cookie while you're browsing amazon.com, then read that value again later when you're actually on Facebook (or when you're on other, entirely unrelated sites which also embed Facebook content).
Total Cookie Protection creates separate "cookie jars" based on the identity of the URL actually present in the address bar. With this feature enabled, a Facebook script running at amazon.com can still set and read a Facebook cookie—but that cookie lives within the amazon.com cookie jar only. When the same user browses facebook.com directly, later, Facebook cannot read, write, or even detect the presence of a Facebook cookie within the amazon.com cookie jar, or vice versa.
This isn't a panacea against tracking, by any means—for example, it does nothing to prevent scripts from Facebook, Amazon, et al. from uploading data about your Web travels to their own servers to profile you there. But it at least keeps them from using your own computer's storage to do the dirty work for them.
How to Enable the Protection:
Edit>Preferences>Privacy & Security Tab
Under Browser Privacy - Enhanced Tracking Protection, select the Strict profile.