One fact of the modern internet is that almost everything you do online will be tracked. Tracking scripts monitor your activity on individual sites and across the web. Websites use this data to identify and fix issues, along with determining user engagement statistics. Advertising companies also use tracking scripts to monitor your activity across multiple sites. This data helps them to create individual “interest profiles” which they use to target advertisements to you.
The scale of this tracking and the data collected concerns many people from a privacy perspective. One of the things you can do to help to prevent this tracking and protect your privacy is to enable the tracking protections in your browser.
To enable tracking protection in the Firefox app on Android you need to change the in-app settings. To be able to access them, you first need to tap the triple-dot icon in the top right of the app.
Tap “Settings”, the second to last entry in the drop-down menu to access the settings list.
In the settings list, tap “Privacy” to view the privacy settings.
Tap the second option in the privacy settings, labelled “Tracking Protection”. A popup window will appear allowing you to choose where the tracking protection is applied. “Enabled”, enables the tracking protection at all times. “Enabled in Private Browsing”, only enables tracking protection in private browsing windows. “Disabled”, completely disables any tracking protections.
Note: The protections will only apply the next time a page is loaded, open pages will still have tracking scripts loaded until they are refreshed.
Tip: You can also enable the “Do not track” functionality if you want. This will modify your web requests to include a request to not be tracked, although most websites do not honour such requests.
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