Ο Firefox 59 will reduce the amount of visitor information transmitted to websites in an effort to improve privacy for users using the private browsing feature.
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 may leak more data that are about what you are interested in, because it mentions on the referring page the exact page you clicked on.
However, browsers are also a collection point for other sensitive information, such as the content of advertisements that interest you (cookies) or information from social media you prefer. This means that all of these built-in content features know exactly which page you are visiting. The websites you visit of course record this data and some of it sells to advertisers.
From time to time we have certain cases, which remind us how important this data is. In the past the researchers of 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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