Firefox 59 will reduce the amount of visitor information transmitted to websites in an effort to improve privacy for users using the private browsing mode.
Today when you click on a link in your browser to find yourself on a new web page, the page you are visiting takes as information the address of the website you came from (clicked) through the so-called "referrer value".
While this helps website owners understand where their visitors are coming from. But the above feature can leak more data about what you're interested in because it mentions on the referring page the exact page you clicked on.
But browsers are space collection and other sensitive information, such as advertising content that interests you (cookies) or information from your preferred social media. This means that all of these built-in content features know exactly which page you're visiting. The websites you visit naturally record this data and some of them sell it to advertisers.
Κατά καιρούς έχουμε ορισμένες περιπτώσεις, που μας υπενθυμίζουν το πόσο σημαντικά είναι αυτά τα δεδομένα. Στο παρελθόν οι ερευνητές του Electronic Frontier Foundation found information circulating online from America's healthcare.gov, which gave information about users' age and zip code, whether they were smokers, and information about their income.
To prevent this data leak, Firefox 59 will have an updated private browsing option that will remove any information sent to third parties.
"This change will prevent site owners from collecting user data and making them available to third parties" said the engineer of the Mozilla Foundation in Privacy Luke Crouch.
Users will also be able to change their default referral options to Firefox.
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