Mozilla Foundation to Crack Down on Supercookies and Web Trackers

• Mozilla is making changes to its security policy to protect its users.
• Exploitative advertising and unconventional tracking methods will be dealt with strictly on the company’s browsers.
• Any kind of exploitative user data tracking like supercookies will no longer be allowed on Firefox.

The Mozilla Foundation updated its security policy to put an end to questionable data tracking policies. The company came to the decision to implement some changes in late 2018 that seeks to curb tracking policies that are deceptive in nature. Intrusive tracking techniques are commonplace with some websites actively tracking data even if you are not a registered member.

Mozilla’s new policy states "stateful identifiers are often used by third parties to associate browsing across multiple websites with the same user and to build profiles of those users, in violation of the user's expectation" as a response to exploitative cross-site tracking. There are other techniques that are just as effective, and Mozilla seeks to crack down on them as well in the future.

Additional restrictions may be implemented to prevent third-parties from adding user identifiers to URLs to track browsing data. Some URL parameters may be set in place by Mozilla if advertisers want to engage in conversion tracking. Browser fingerprinting and use of supercookies will be flagged as well. As long as advertisers and website owners are clear about their intentions and use direct data tracking methods with clear communication to users indicating the same, they will not be removed.

All of the changes are a collective result of studies and preparation by Mozilla, and the company revealed that it is about time that they take a hard stance on ad-tracking activity on the internet. Any kind of scripts that behave in suspicious ways will be blocked, and any kind of unconventional methods used by advertisers to track user behavior on websites will be blocked as well.

Mozilla has given a red signal to anyone who seeks to misuse the company’s browsers. Other browsers like Edge and Chrome are trying to prevent intrusive ads and tracking methods as well. It remains to be seen if advertisers are able to find new methods of tricking users into giving up their data.

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