updated on August 28, 2024.
Get your privacy back
Firefox is making Total Cookie Protection available by default for more Firefox users worldwide, making Firefox the most private and secure browser on Windows, Mac, Linux and Android. Total Cookie Protection is Firefox’s strongest privacy protection yet. It restricts cookies to the site that created them, preventing tracking companies from using those cookies to track your browsing behavior from site to site.
Whether you’re applying for a student loan, searching for treatment or advice on a healthcare website, or browsing an online dating app, vast amounts of your personal data are online—and that data is leaking out everywhere on the web. The hyper-targeted ads you see so often online are made possible by cookies that track your behavior across different websites, building an extremely complex profile of you.
Stories (including an excellent episode of “Last Week Tonight”) have shown how robust yet under-the-radar the data selling economy is, and how easy it is for anyone to buy your data, combine it with other data about you, and use it for a variety of purposes, even beyond advertising.
It’s an alarming reality – the possibility that your every move online is being watched, tracked, and shared – and one that runs counter to the open Internet we strive to build at Mozilla. That’s why we built Total Cookie Protection to keep you safe online.
What is Total Cookie Protection?
Total Cookie Protection provides strong protection against tracking without affecting your browsing experience.
Total Cookie Protection works by creating a separate “cookie jar” for each website you visit. Instead of allowing trackers to link your behavior across multiple websites, they can only see behavior on individual websites. Each time a website, or third-party content embedded in a website, places a cookie on your browser, that cookie is restricted to the cookie jar that is assigned only this website. No other website can access the cookie jars that don’t belong to them and find out what the other websites’ cookies know about you. This keeps you safe from intrusive advertising and reduces the amount of information companies collect about you.
This approach strikes a balance between removing the worst privacy properties of third-party cookies – particularly the ability to track you – and allowing these cookies to serve their less invasive use cases (e.g. to provide accurate analytics). With Total Cookie Protection in Firefox, users can enjoy more privacy and have the great browsing experience they expect.
Total Cookie Protection provides additional privacy protections that go beyond our existing anti-tracking features. Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP), which we introduced in 2018, works by blocking trackers based on a maintained list. If a party is on that list, they can no longer use third-party cookies. ETP has been a big win for privacy for Firefox users, but we know this approach has some flaws. If a tracker isn’t on that list for some reason, it can still track users and violate their privacy. And if an attacker wants to thwart ETP, they can set up a new tracking domain that isn’t on the list. Total Cookie Protection avoids these problems by providing functionality for all Cookies, not just those on a defined list.
The culmination of years of work against tracking
Total Cookie Protection is the result of years of work to combat the privacy disaster caused by online trackers. We started in 2015 with the release of Tracking Protection, a feature that users could enable by switching to private browsing mode. We realized then that browser makers could not simply stand by and watch their users being abused. In 2018, we introduced Enhanced Tracking Protection and enabled it by default for all Firefox users in 2019, reflecting our commitment to actively protecting our users rather than expecting them to protect themselves. Since then, we’ve made further progress in blocking trackers and stopping cross-site tracking by introducing protections against fingerprinting and supercookies.
The release of Total Cookie Protection is the result of experimentation and feature testing, first in ETP Strict Mode and Private Browsing windows, then in Firefox Focus earlier this year. We are now making it a standard feature for all Firefox desktop users worldwide.
Our long history of fighting online tracking is evident in our engagement with policymakers and other technology companies to strengthen their own privacy measures. We also push to make privacy an industry priority by engaging in industry standards as we shape the future of online advertising. In addition, we created the Privacy Not Included guide to simplify the very complicated privacy landscape and help consumers shop smarter and more securely for products connected to the internet.
For more than a decade, Mozilla has proudly led the fight for a more private internet. Bringing Total Cookie Protection to more Firefox users was an important step on that journey, but we continue to have our sights set on an even safer, even better internet. And starting in 2024, all of our users can look forward to Firefox blocking even more third-party cookies. That’s right; we’re taking big steps to introduce new cookie partitioning and deletion mechanisms so users can browse with fewer cookies that don’t stick around as long and lead to an even better browsing experience. Just another step on our journey to creating a better internet where your privacy is not an option.
Reclaim your privacy by downloading Firefox today.
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