Security News > 2020 > August > Firefox to block redirect tracking

Mozilla has announced a new Firefox protection feature to stymie a new user tracking technique lately employed by online advertisers: redirect tracking.

By implementing anti-fingerprinting protections, an anti tracking policy, Enhanced Tracking Protection blocking trackers, cross-site and third-party tracking cookies, Mozilla has, slowly but surely, been enhancing Firefox tracking protections for years.

"Let's say you're browsing a product review website and you click a link to purchase a pair of shoes from an online retailer. A few seconds later Firefox navigates to the retailer's website and the product page loads. Nothing looks out of place to you, but behind the scenes you were tracked using redirect tracking," Mozilla privacy engineer Steven Englehardt explained.

"When the redirect tracker is loaded as a first party, the tracker will be able to access its cookies. It can associate information about which website you're coming from with identifiers stored in those cookies. If a lot of websites redirect through this tracker, the tracker can effectively track you across the web. After it finishes saving its tracking data, it automatically redirects you to the original destination."

"When you first visit a redirect tracker it can store a unique identifier in its cookies. Any redirects to that tracker during the 24 hour window will be able to associate tracking data with that same identifying cookie. However, once ETP 2.0's cookie clearing runs, the identifying cookies will be deleted from Firefox and you'll look like a fresh user the next time you visit the tracker," Englehardt noted.

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