Firefox 93 address bar introduces ad sponsor search suggestions

With the release of Firefox 93, the developer Mozilla also caused a lot of controversy due to the insertion of advertisements in the browser, even if it claimed that this would help the subsequent development and optimization of Firefox. Specifically, Firefox Suggest is no longer satisfied with providing relevant suggestions through the browser history when the user enters but has introduced relevant suggestions and sponsored suggestions from trusted partners-also It’s advertising!

Although Mozilla may insist on dealing with partners that meet Firefox’s privacy standards, everyone is still worried about the privacy concerns brought about by new search suggestions. After all, anything the user enters in the multi-function address bar will be sent back to Mozilla for processing to provide the expected ad clicks.

Fortunately, users can still manually disable Firefox Suggest and hide ads in the browser:

  • Click the hamburger menu in the upper right corner of the browser and select settings.
  • Go to the privacy and Security’ section.
  • Find’Address Bar -> Firefox Suggest’ and uncheck all boxes.
  • If you need to keep some of the address bar search suggestions without privacy and advertising concerns, you can just cancel the “context search” and “occasionally include suggestions from sponsors” sub-options.

In the official support document, Mozilla explains what user data the new version of Firefox will collect- when a user chooses to accept contextual search suggestions, Mozilla will rely on the following information to support Firefox Suggest:

  • Search query and suggestion impression: Firefox Suggest will send interactive information related to search keywords to Mozilla, and some of the information may be shared with partners to improve content suggestions.
  • Click suggestion: When the user clicks, Mozilla will receive a notification that the suggestion link was clicked.
  • Location information: Mozilla will collect location data specific to the user’s city to provide more accurate location query suggestions.

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In addition, Mozilla further explained how the data is processed and shared:

Mozilla will treat this data very conservatively and delete it from the system as soon as it is no longer needed. When transferring data to partners, Mozilla will be careful to provide partners with only the minimum information relevant to it.

Take the IP address referenced by Firefox as an example. Because it can be used for fairly accurate personal positioning, Mozilla will convert it into more coarse location information and exclude the IP address from all data sets and downstream reports.

Access to short-term temporary data sets that may contain IP addresses will also be highly restricted and limited to only a few administrators. Finally, Mozilla will not enable or allow data analysis that includes IP addresses.

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