Firefox: More Security, Less Privacy?
Perhaps I imagined it, but a few days ago when I allowed Firefox to update to fix security vulnerabilities my privacy settings were reset to less private settings. I had Firefox set to clear the history on exit, and prompt me. I also had it set not to accept third party cookies. After the upgrade the settings were rest to defaults. I simply happened to notice that I wasn’t prompted when I closed Firefox.
A day or so later another update for Firefox and the privacy options were reset to the defaults. This is not a behavior that should be happening. Perhaps my computer is an anomaly and there is a conflict. Is anyone else seeing this behavior?
At any rate, it is always a good idea to check the settings of your programs periodically, and especially after an update.
Randy Abrams
Director of Technical Education
4 Responses to “Firefox: More Security, Less Privacy?”
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August 6th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
I did notice this when I upgraded from 3.5 to 3.5.1, but it hasn’t happened since.
That really doesn’t seem like something Mozilla would do, but that could be faith at work.
August 6th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
oh, I forgot to mention. I recently started keeping my firefox profile on a partition shared between windows and linux, so the upgrade process may be trying to overwrite something in a default location but missing my profile.
August 7th, 2009 at 9:38 am
With Firefox 3.5 there is a new option in “Settings for Clearing History” called “Site Preferences”. This option must not be selected in order to maintain cookie preferences.
August 7th, 2009 at 7:06 pm
This seems to be a unconfirmed FF bug
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=437824
reported on 2008-06-07.
Please add your comments to the bug.