Lorin Olsen
In its latest release, Firefox extends its privacy advantage over other browsers. Their efforts at continuous privacy improvement may keep you ahead of those who wish to exploit you.
Firefox 63 Extends Privacy Lead

In the era of Demmings, the mantra was continuous process improvement. The imperative to remain current and always improve continues even to this day. And as of this morning, the Mozilla team has demonstrated its commitment to continuous privacy improvement; the release of Firefox 63 is continuing the commitment of the entire open source community to the principle that Internet access is universal and should be unencumbered.

Nothing New…But Now Universally Available

I’ve been using the new browsing engine (in the form of Firefox Quantum) for quite some time. This new engine is an incremental improvement upon previous rendering engines. In particular, those who enabled tracker protection often had to deal with web sites that would not render very successfully. It then became a trade-off between privacy and functionality.

But now that the main code branch has incorporated the new engine, there is more control over tracker protection. And this control will allow those who are concerned about privacy to still use some core sites on the web. This new capability is not fully matured. But in its current form, many new users can start to implement protection from trackers.

Beyond Rendering

But my efforts at continuous privacy improvement are also including enhanced filtering from my Pi-hole DNS platforms. The Pi-hole has faithfully blocked ads for several years. But I’ve decided to up the ante a bit.

  1. I decided to add regular expressions to increase the coverage of ad blocking. I added the following regex filters:
         
         ^(.+[-_.])??ad[sxv]?[0-9]*[-_.]
         ^adim(age|g)s?[0-9]*[-_.]
         ^adse?rv(e(rs?)?|ices?)?[0-9]*[-.]
         ^adtrack(er|ing)?[0-9]*[-.]
         ^advert(s|is(ing|ements?))?[0-9]*[-_.]
         ^aff(iliat(es?|ion))?[-.]
         ^analytics?[-.]
         ^banners?[-.]
         ^beacons?[0-9]*[-.]
         ^clicks?[-.]
         ^count(ers?)?[0-9]*[-.]
         ^pixels?[-.]
         ^stat(s|istics)?[0-9]*[-.]
         ^telemetry[-.]
         ^track(ers?|ing)?[0-9]*[-.]
         ^traff(ic)?[-.]
    2.      
  2. My wife really desires to access some sites that are more “relaxed” in their attitude. Consequently, I set her devices to use the Cloudfare DNS servers (i.e., 1.1.1.1, and 1.0.0.1). I then added firewall rules to block all Google DNS access. This should allow me to bypass ads embedded in Google devices that configure Goggle’s DNS (e.g., Chromecast, Google Home, etc). I then added these rules to my router.

         iptables -I FORWARD –destination 8.8.8.8 -j REJECT
         iptables -I FORWARD –destination 8.8.4.4 -j REJECT

These updates now block ads on my Roku devices and on my Chromecast devices.

Bottom Line

In the fight to ensure your privacy, it is not enough to “fire and forget” with a fixed set of tools. Instead, you must always be prepared to improve your situation. After all, advertisers and identity thieves are always trying to improve their reach into your wallet. Show them who the real boss is. It should be (and can be) you!

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