Two Short Stories about Tracking Protection

Here are two slide decks I made about why online tracking is a privacy concern, and a metaphor for how tracking works.

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How do I turn on Tracking Protection? Let me count the ways.

I get this question a lot from various people, so it deserves its own post. Here's how to turn on Tracking Protection in Firefox to avoid connecting to known tracking domains from Disconnect's blocklist:

1. Visit about:config and turn on privacy.trackingprotection.enabled. Because this works Firefox 35 or later, this is my favorite method. In Firefox 37 and later, it also works on Fennec.
2. On Fennec Nightly, visit Settings > Privacy and select the checkbox "Tracking Protection".
   
3. Install Lightbeam and toggle the "Tracking Protection" button in the top-right corner. Check out the difference in visiting only 2 sites with Tracking Protection on and off!
   
4. On Firefox Nightly, visit about:config and turn on browser.polaris.enabled. This will enable privacy.trackingprotection.enabled and also show the checkbox for it in about:preferences#privacy, similar to the Fennec screenshot above. Because this only works in Nightly and also requires visiting about:config, it's my least favorite option.
5. Do any of the above and sign into Firefox Sync. Tracking Protection will be enabled on all of your desktop profiles!

Tracking Protection talk on Air Mozilla

In August 2014, Georgios Kontaxis and I gave a talk on the implementation status of tracking protection in Firefox. At the time the talk was Mozillians only, but now it is public! Please visit Air Mozilla to view the talk, or see the slides below. The implementation status has not changed very much since last August, so most of the information is still pretty accurate.