Google Privacy Add-On For Firefox Lets You Disable Activity Tracking

For the past months, user privacy has been covered publicly by various organizations and communities. We had protests against ACTA and we had communities speaking against Google’s new privacy policy.

Well, for the latter we have a Firefox add-on that will disable Google Privacy, so that it does not track your activity on popular websites. The name of the Firefox add-on is actually Google Privacy but its not related in any way with the search giant; it was created by an member of the Firefox vast community.

At the moment, it has support for just a few popular websites like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Facebook, YouTube or Ask. The concept of Google Privacy add-on for Firefox is to change the link for these websites in order to disable their tracking functionality. Please note that Google Privacy add-on for Firefox can block only a part of your activity, as some of the popular websites use JavaScripts to analyze and record the traffic.

As with any other add-on, you should restart your browser once you install Google Privacy for Firefox add-on for the changes to take effect. Once you reopen the browser and go to the add-on manager, on the right side of the Google Privacy options menu you will see what are the privacy options for each of the websites. On the left side you can find the general options for Google Privacy add-on for Firefox. You can find out if a website is tracking your activity if you look carefully at the small icon next to each of the website. If you can see a green icon then it means that your activity is currently being tracked for that website; if you can see a red icon, then you’re privacy is protected.

As an addition, Google Privacy add-on for Firefox allows you to automatically hide the tracking links which means that you will view only the links that are safe for you to access (sticking to the websites supported by the add-on).

If a two links point you to the same website, in Google Privacy add-on for Firefox you can opt to enable tracking your activity for the known websites. Even though it might interfere with what you’re doing on the website, you can also choose to block a website from tracking where you click on.

If you feel like protecting your online activity, by preventing websites to track it down I think that you should at least give Google Privacy add-on for Firefox a try. Like we said, the add-on currently supports only a few popular websites but in the near future we can expect other plugins to support even more.

Click here to download Google Privacy add-on for Firefox.

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