Your Internet provider knows where you are. How to keep your browsing more private

If you use Firefox, your web browsing habits become a bit mysterious to your Internet provider.

Mozilla is a non-profit developer of US and Firefox web browsers. Desktop Firefox does this by turning users into an encrypted directory helper behind all Internet navigation, as announced in a post last week.

This change includes the domain name service, which can be found online, by translating your request into a numerical Internet protocol or IP, which will deliver the site to the computer-matching address that matches the query web page.

With traditional Internet providers, "DNS" sends encryption to these queries without much email and web browsing protection. So your provider can find the domain names you want to visit, as EWDrapper can do online.

Digitally calling the 411 over the speakerphone - or, for generations to come, asking Siri a private question in a crowded room.

The fact that you are checking out Amazon may not shock anyone. But a visit to specific presidential candidate sites or some health-advocacy organizations reveals a lot about you.

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Firefox closes the loopholes by cutting off your internet provider and any interlopers from the loop. Instead, it sends every lookup query through an encrypted link to network-security firm Cloudflare, which offers free and encrypted DNS services from 2018 onwards.

Your provider will still see the Internet Protocol address of the sites you visit - but in most cases, they will only match the servers in the "Content Delivery Network" hosted by most companies wherever you go. Leaving very little evidence.


Mozilla said it will close automatically in the next few weeks.

To see if the new Firefox feature is activated or turned on automatically, click the menu button in the top right corner, select "Preferences", scroll to the Network Settings header, and click the button below "Settings", and check the "Enable DNS via HTTPS" option Please.
Joseph Lorenzo Hall, senior vice president of Internet at the nonprofit group Internet Society, called encrypted DNS "an important consumer-protection step in reducing the amount of digital exhaust from our devices, homes and vehicles."

(Remember that the Firefox version may not help other applications on your computer, such as your email app. To do this, you need to change your computer's network settings to use a different DNS - as some technology users have done over the years. Ride some ISP breakups.]

So why don't other browsers offer the same feature? Compatibility issues can be a cause; Hall said in an email that some parent-control systems are struggling with this. If it detects such a filter, Firefox will disable this encrypted search.

Selection problems also arise because browsers traditionally leave this setting to system-wide settings on any computer. For example, Google announced in September that its Chrome browser would switch to more secure search if the current DNS was provided.

You must also rely on an external DNS provider to avoid misusing your online habits. Cloudflare said it would delete DNS-lookup records after 24 hours.

Comcast pointed to Google's ability to redirect queries to its own encrypted DNS to combat this trend. The lobbying documents obtained by Vice's tech-news site Motherboard finally invited Google to grill it.

Internet users who have no choice of broadband provider, however, cannot feel bad about losing this lock's local monopoly over their online lives.