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: