In a move that will make tracking users and attribution significantly harder, Firefox announced a slew of new privacy features, including an upgraded Facebook Container. Firefox claim this will affect thousands of companies who use tracking.

Firefox’s announcement:

Enhanced Tracking Protection will automatically be set on by default as part of the ‘Standard’ setting in the browser and will block known “third-party tracking cookies”

What they say about cookies:

For Cookies, the feature lets you select from one of four options, so let’s break them down.

  • Block cookies from third-party trackers: This prevents trackers from using cookies to follow you around the web.
  • Block cookies from unvisited websites:  This blocks third-party cookies just from the sites that you have never explicitly visited before.
  • Blocking all-third party cookies: This option blocks all third-party cookies on a page, not just the identified trackers.  This gives you more privacy protection, but it may cause websites to break and also cause you to see just how pervasive tracking is.
  • Blocking all cookies: This will ensure that you’re not being tracked, but it will definitely break parts of the web.

The announcement also provides more information about the enhanced Facebook Container:

“The latest update for Facebook Container prevents Facebook from tracking you on other sites that have embedded Facebook capabilities such as the Share and Like buttons on their site.

For example, when you are on a news site and reading an article, you often see Facebook Like and Share buttons. Our Facebook Container will block these buttons and all connections to Facebook’s servers, so that Facebook isn’t able to track your visits to these sites.”