21 September 2020

Android Firefox exposes your address

In today’s modern world the masses are taught that upgrades are supposed to be good, but good for who?

If you bought something from a manufacturer it might be good for you, and also for the manufacturer as they made a profit from you, but if you only bought it just once, then it maybe not so good for the company, so they could hinder the design of a product with the plan for ‘upgrades’ already on the drawing board in order to maximise/extort profits from their customers.

In the automotive industry the upgrade path is a bit more obvious in an example from Model T Ford to a newer vehicle will not only give better ‘creature’ (because that’s what some of your are, just ‘creatures’) comforts like air-conditioning, automatic windows but also safety features like (real) brakes and safety lights.

Since the advent of mobile internet connected devices the so called upgrades are a bit more dubious.

Apple in its first rendition of the iPhone did not have copy and paste enabled in the software, where other companies did so in their archaic PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), where also hardware inside the iPhone was limited by software switches enabled in the next ‘update’. NOT a very honest company, right?

Today’s I.T. corporations are all about metadata and so called ‘advertising’ (read: government corporation data collection) for a ‘better user experience’ (whatever that means) but in reality that data is harvested to be used against you in the future.

Smart phone apps (or programs) are the worst privacy offenders and that’s why corporations are pushing you the consumer data generator to use them, despite the illusion that you have disabled an access setting via a software toggle switch.

Web browsers on a smart phone provide less access to information than apps can obtain, but those days are coming to an end soon.

An essential element to your internet privacy is something called your IP (Internet Protocol) address, e.g. 216.58.200.101 (in this case Google’s email server).

Device fingerprinting and browser fingerprinting are the two major ways corporations are now using to identify you personally on the internet, irrespective of how they deny this publicly.

In previous versions of Firefox (for Android) you could lessen your footprint or somewhat hide your IP address from sites in a setting where it’s tested under a WebRTC Leak Test, as seen in the screen capture below.

 


If you ‘upgrade’ to a new version of Mozilla’s Firefox for Android smart phones , your ability to go into that setting is removed by the corporation, therefore making you more vulnerable to online fraud or even doxing.

This also exposes your IPv6 address which also uniquely identifies you and is more dangerous to your online privacy, as seen in the edited screen capture below:

 


To protect your IP address from leaking within Firefox, in the address bar type about:config and toggle media.peerconnection.enabled to false.

To test if your pissing your IP address all over the internet go to:

https://browserleaks.com/webrtc

We do not recommend updating or even using a version of Firefox, if you cannot disable WebRTC leaks.

So, you think DuckDuckGo (the Android web browsing app) is any better?

It's quackin' your IP address all over the joint:



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