Security/Tracking protection

Description

Websites need to be able to deliver and monetize the content they create. Users want more protection from online tracking. Tracking Protection is a new platform-level technology that blocks HTTP loads at the network level. Coupled with a user-declared opt-out, such as Do Not Track, we will explore various paths that can provide users with more safety while allowing websites to reliably deliver ads that meet or exceed consumer's tracking preferences.

This feature is part of the Polaris initiative.

https://intranet.mozilla.org/TrackingProtectionForFirefox

Engineering

• Tracking Bug
• Client implementation
• Server implementation
• Telemetry dashboard

List

• Upstream list (how it's created)
• List conversion script
• Allow list
• List policy
• The list is stored in these files:
  • ~/.cache/mozilla/firefox/XXXX/safebrowsing/mozpub-track-digest256.* on Linux
  • ~/Library/Caches/Firefox/Profiles/XXXX/safebrowsing/mozpub-track-digest256.* on Mac

QA

• Test plan for Fx42
• Breakage bugs
• Ideas for a testing strategy
• Test page
• One and Done task
• Script to dump the contents of mozpub-track-digest256* files

To turn on debugging output, export the following environment variable:

NSPR_LOG_MODULES="UrlClassifierDbService:5,nsChannelClassifier:5"

To produce the "digest256" hash that sbdbdump -v will contain for example.com:

echo -n "example.com/" | sha256sum 
7fc983ea552f7c8d153fc308d621eb4f52e84aa63ecccf3a735698a11a2a4a8d

UX

• Tracking Protection and Control Center

Documentation

• SUMO instructions
• Ways to turn it ON
• Presentation on Air Mozilla
• Announcement blog post
• Paper quantifying the privacy and performance impact of Tracking Protection