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Comment by teddyfrozevelt

9 years ago

Going through your browser settings really is quite the hoop.

Yeah, its so intuitive for the average person to type: about:config in address bar and scroll through hundreds of oddly named parameters to turn off spyware.

Comments like yours are illustrative of a certain mindset. When you encounter the complexity of domains you are not intimately familiar with (court system, law, finance, etc), and those complexities are designed specifically to make it hard for you to protect yourself, I'm sure you are just as understanding as you are now.

  • You're being hyperbolic, you don't need to go into about:config.

    It's right in the main browser settings, under the Privacy and Security section where one would expect settings like this to be

    • If what you say is true, please point me to where I can find the following privacy settings in the main preferences:

        network.websocket.enabled
        network.IDN_show_punycode
        dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled
        dom.storage.enabled
        dom.indexedDB.enabled
        dom.battery.enabled
        dom.enable_user_timing
        dom.enable_resource_timing
        dom.netinfo.enabled
        layout.css.visited_links_enabled
        browser.safebrowsing.phishing.enabled
        browser.safebrowsing.downloads.remote.enabled
        browser.safebrowsing.malware.enabled
        browser.send_pings
        beacon.enabled
        privacy.donottrackheader.enabled
        privacy.trackingprotection.enabled
        dom.enable_performance
        datareporting.healthreport.service.enabled
        datareporting.healthreport.uploadEnabled
        toolkit.telemetry.enabled
        toolkit.telemetry.unified
        media.peerconnection.enabled
        media.peerconnection.ice.default_address_only
        media.peerconnection.ice.no_host
        media.eme.enabled
        media.gmp-eme-adobe.enabled
        webgl.disabled
        geo.enabled
        camera.control.face_detection.enabled
        device.sensors.enabled
        security.tls.unrestricted_rc4_fallback
        security.tls.insecure_fallback_hosts.use_static_list
        security.ssl.require_safe_negotiation
        security.ssl.treat_unsafe_negotiation_as_broken

      1 reply →

    • > It's right in the main browser settings, under the Privacy and Security section where one would expect settings like this to be

      If you asked me "where would you go to change settings to prevent the browser from violating your privacy and infringing on your security?", then, yes, I would go to "Privacy and Security". If, however, you asked me "what would you expect to find under 'Privacy and Security'?", my answer would be that that's where I would go to protect myself from malicious websites, not from malicious browsers.

      (I know that 'malicious' is quite, and almost certainly too, strong here, but the point is that I think, and am explicitly encouraged to think, of Mozilla as being on my side against the sites I visit, and I don't think it's natural to expect that I will start thinking of how I need to protect myself from Mozilla to use their products in the way that I, rather than they, intend.)

How are you supposed to do turn the defaults to a reasonable level of privacy without launching Firefox once though?

  • I remember it was asking if I want participate in studies when I installed FF for the first time.