How to set up Enhanced Tracking, Protection Breach Alerts, Lockwise in Firefox

If there is one thing about Firefox, I love, it is their motivation and works toward Privacy. Every time we visit a website, cookies, scripts, and trackers are loaded to create your profile. Post which no matter where you go, you get tracked, and in turn, you can be served targetted content. Firefox in their recent update as rolled out a Privacy Protections Dashboard. In this dashboard, you can view the tracking report, breach alert based on your email id, and offers Lockwise feature for secure password sync method.

Enhanced Tracking, Lockwise & Protection Breach Alerts in Firefox

In this post, we will see how to set up Enhanced Tracking and Protection Breach Alerts vis Firefox Privacy settings. I wish all browsers had offered similar anti-tracking scheme.

1. What are Protection Settings in Firefox
2. Set up Enhanced Tracking Protection
3. Configure Data Breach Alert for an email address
4. Configure Lockwise.

1] What is Protection Settings in Firefox

Firefox offers an extremely detailed data on how websites track you, and the number of scripts it has blocked as you keep visiting a website. Lets first see how it looks like when you visit a site.

• Open any website, and click on the Security Shield icon
• You can then access
  • Social media trackers
  • Cross-Site tracking cookies
  • Not blocking tracking content
  • Fingerprint
  • Cryptominers
• Next, you have two more options—Protection Settings and Show Report. Let’s take a look at each of them

What do shield colors mean?

• Purple: Firefox has blocked trackers and harmful scripts on a site.
• Gray: No known trackers or harmful scripts were detected on a site.
• Gray and crossed out:  Enhanced Tracking Protection is turned off on a site.

The default protection setting is set to standard. It offers a balanced configuration to track all these trackings we mentioned above.

1. When you choose Strict, then it blocks more scripts that could be tracking you. However, many websites offer custom stricks, which can result in improper functions of the website. So make sure to experience it something before changing.
2. Custom is where you choose what can be blocked and what is allowed. It is for those who are more aware of how tracking works and choose their level accordingly.

Report on Trackers based on browsing habit

This gives you list trackers that were blocked. It also categorizes them into Social media trackers, cross-site cookies, tracking content, fingerprints, and the Cryptominers. The default range is the last seven days.

2] How to set up Enhanced Tracking Protection in Firefox

1. Type about:preferences#privacy in a new tab to open protection settings
2. Switch to the one you like. Any open website will reload.
3. When you choose custom, you can configure each of the trackings individually.
4. If you are confident about some websites, you can add exclude them. Click on Manage exception, and anything that comes from them is ignored. You can remove a site from here, but to add it, there is a different method.

To add a website to the exception list, open the site in Firefox, and click on the shield icon. Toggle off “Enable tracking protection.” You can also remove them from the exception list by turning on the toggle.

2] How to set up alerts for Data Brech

• Type “about: protections” in a new tab, and hit enter.
• Scroll to find “Look out for data breaches.”
• Here you need to enter your email id for which you want to get an alert for Data Breaches. You can add more email id using the Manage email addresses section.
• Once you submit your email id, Firefox Privacy will instantly find all the data breaches in which your email id was involved.
• You can directly go to https://monitor.firefox.com/user/dashboard and view all the data.
  • First, you get to see a summary of how many email address is being monitored.
  • Second is the number of breaches the email id was involved
  • Lastly, how many violations were related to Password breaches.

The next obvious step is to reset your password for those accounts. If you are not using any of those services, make sure to delete your account from them.

4] Lockwise

Lockwise is an inbuilt password manager in Firefox Browser. It can securely store and sync your passwords to all devices with the same Firefox account. You can manage all passwords, and also devices.

• To view how many devices are using this feature, click on Manage devices, and you can revoke or make changes here.
• Click on View Logins to see all the stored passwords. You can delete or make changes here.

Firefox is extremely serious about tracking, and they are giving back to the consumers what they always wanted. A sense of control and awareness about what is going on with your data.

We highly recommend you to use it and evaluate it on a weekly basis.