Firefox now sends keystrokes from your address bar to Mozilla

Firefox now sends more data than you think to Mozilla. To power Firefox Suggest, Firefox sends the keystrokes you type in your address bar, location information, and more to Mozilla’s servers. Here’s exactly what Firefox shares and how to control it.

How Firefox Suggest works

This change was made as part of the introduction of Firefox Suggest in Firefox 93, released on October 5, 2021. As part of Firefox Suggest, Firefox receives ads in your search bar, but it’s not the only one something that will be new for a long time to come. Firefox users.

According to Mozilla, “Firefox Suggest acts as a reliable guide to a better web, bringing up relevant information and sites to help people achieve their goals.”

What this actually means is that when you start typing in your address bar, you won’t just see standard search suggestions from Google or your current default search engine. You will also see “Firefox Suggest” results pointing to web pages. Some of these are sponsored ads, but you can opt out of the ads.

What data does Firefox send to Mozilla?

Firefox Suggest is enabled by default. The Mozilla blog post on the subject indicates that Firefox Suggest is an “optional experience”, which was the case in September 2021, but is now enabled by default in Firefox 93.

However, since Firefox 93 was released in October 2021, Firefox Suggest is only enabled in the United States, for now.

It should be noted that for many years Firefox and other web browsers have had search suggestions in their address bar. So when you start typing “win” in your address bar, you may see suggestions for “Windows 11” and “Window repair”. This is accomplished by sending keystrokes to your default search engine as you type in the search bar.

Unfortunately, all major browsers now use a combined address and search bar. So if you type in the address of a sensitive website to jump straight to it, your keystrokes as you type will be sent to your default search engine and your search engine may be able to determine the website address that you enter manually. .

Firefox Suggest is just more than that. In addition to sending your keystrokes to Google or whatever your default search engine is, Firefox will also send them to Mozilla. The search engine of your choice and Mozilla will return suggestions.

Mozilla also provides contextual suggestions, for which it needs more data, including the city you are in and whether you click on its suggestions.

To provide contextual suggestions, Firefox will need to send new data to Mozilla, specifically what you type in the search bar, city-level location data to find out what’s nearby and relevant, as well as whether you are typing in the search bar. click a suggestion and which suggestion you click. to.

How to turn off Firefox suggestion

You can turn off the results suggested by Firefox, if you wish. This will prevent Mozilla from collecting the data you enter into your search bar and will also disable suggested results and ads.

To do this, open Firefox and click menu> Settings. Select “Privacy and Security” from the left pane and scroll down to “Address Bar – Firefox Suggest”. Disable “Pop-up Suggestions” and “Include Occasional Sponsored Suggestions” to prevent Firefox from sending data to Mozilla.

Advice: To prevent Firefox from sending your keystrokes to your default search engine (Google or whatever) when you type in your address bar, click “Change preferences for search engine suggestions” here and also uncheck the option “Provide search suggestions”.

Mozilla promises privacy

It should be noted that Mozilla promises not to abuse your data:

… .We will only collect the data we need to operate, update and improve Firefox Suggest functionality and the overall user experience based on our Lean Data and Data Privacy Principles. We will also continue to be transparent about our data and data collection practices as we develop this new functionality.

It all sounds good, but if Mozilla were really as transparent as possible about their data collection practices, would you learn about Firefox Suggest from an article like this instead of seeing a clear message in Firefox itself? same ?