Customizing Mozilla's Privacy Settings
This article is designed to walk you through customizing security settings for the Mozilla browser. By default, the browser is configured with very good security levels (especially when compared with Internet Explorer); we'll briefly cover what those settings mean and show you how to adjust them to your tastes.
Cookies
Cookies are small files written to your hard drive by website's to keep track of certain preferences. For example, if you log into a chat forum, the system needs some way of keeping track of who you are: it does this by writing a file to your computer and then reading it every time it needs to identify you.
Not surprisingly, some companies take advantage of this ability to do more than it was intended use. Commonly, a third party (generally advertising research groups) will write a cookie to your hard drive and use it to track every site you visit and how long you spend there. The next time you connect to a server with their ads, they'll read the cookie and upload information on your viewing habits to their servers which they'll sell to advertisers.
One of the strengths of the Mozilla browser is that, for the most part, that is all they can do (Internet Explorer, for example, makes it easy for companies to actually install keylogging programs which keep track of everything you do). Still, most of us prefer to keep our business our own and Mozilla provides easy ways of doing that.
To disable third-party cookies, go to Mozilla → Preferences → Privacy & Security → Cookies, select "Enable cookies based on privacy settings", then click "View". Select "custom" and select "Reject" for all of the options under "Third Party Cookies". Setting an option to flag causes the browser to present cookies fitting that description to you and lets you decide what to do with it.
If you want to be really paranoid, or just interested, you can actually have Mozilla ask you every time it wants to set a cookie. Although you probably wouldn't want that setting all of the time, turning it on temporarily can be an interesting experience. Turn it on by going to Mozilla → Preferences → Privacy & Security → Cookies, selecting "Enable all cookies" and checking "Ask me before storing a cookie".
Last updated: 10/03/06
