The company has tightened the privacy available through its browser app for Android.
Mozilla has announced that it has enhanced the mobile security and privacy protection in the Android version of its Firefox browser app to allow users to stop cookies from tracking them between sites.
It has become commonplace for people to shop for a product on one site and see it elsewhere in an ad.
It would be difficult to find a device users who hadn’t been shopping online for a product of some kind, only to decide not to get it after having had a look at its page a couple of times. Then, when visiting other websites unrelated to where the user was shopping, ads start appearing featuring the item or items that were previously being considered.
This happens because of cookies that track a user from one site to the next, and Mozilla has announced that it is boosting its mobile security and privacy features with Total Cookie Protection (TCP) as a default setting on its Firefox app for Android. This feature is already available for the app’s users on Windows, Mac and Linux. Now, Android mobile device users can also benefit from improved privacy levels.
Mobile security and privacy from TCP occur by blocking cookies from being shared across sites.
Usually, third-party cookies are used to gather data about a user throughout the internet. They accumulate to develop a virtual identity. Data brokers then sell that data to businesses so that they can target their ads to you in a way that is most likely to appeal to you with the specific products and services you’re seeking.
However, with TCP in place, the cookies created when a user browses will belong exclusively to the site where they originate. In this way, companies can’t learn anything about a user’s behavior or what they enter into forms unless it occurs on their own site. It won’t follow a user throughout the internet.
In this way, mobile security and privacy are enhanced because, for instance, if a user visits a site and shops for a shirt, that site will know that. However, it won’t know that the same user had previously been shopping for socks at a different online store.
