{"id":12655,"date":"2020-05-22T08:29:13","date_gmt":"2020-05-22T15:29:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/?p=12655"},"modified":"2020-05-22T10:12:39","modified_gmt":"2020-05-22T17:12:39","slug":"usa-freedom-and-browsing-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/blogarchive\/blog\/2020\/05\/22\/usa-freedom-and-browsing-history\/","title":{"rendered":"The USA Freedom Act and Browsing History"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Last Thursday, the US Senate voted to renew<\/a> the USA Freedom Act<\/a> which authorizes a variety of forms of national surveillance. As has been reported, this renewal does not include<\/a> an amendment offered by Sen. Ron Wyden and Sen. Steve Daines that would have explicitly prohibited the warrantless collection of Web browsing history. The legislation is now\u00a0 being considered by the House of Representatives and today Mozilla and a number of other technology companies sent a letter<\/a> urging them to adopt the Wyden-Daines language in their version of the bill. This post helps fill in the technical background of what all this means.<\/p>\n

Despite what you might think from the term \u201cbrowsing history,\u201d we\u2019re not talking about browsing data stored on your <\/i>computer. Web browsers like Firefox store, on your computer, a list of the places you\u2019ve gone so that you can go back and find things and to help provide better suggestions when you type stuff in the awesomebar. That\u2019s how it is that you can type \u2018f\u2019 in the awesomebar and it might suggest you go to Facebook.<\/p>\n

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Browsers also store a pile of other information on your computer, like cookies, passwords, cached files, etc. that help improve your browsing experience and all of this can be used to infer where you have been. This information obviously has privacy implications if you share a computer or if someone gets access to your computer, and most browsers provide some sort of mode that lets you surf without storing history (Firefox calls this Private Browsing<\/a>). Anyway, while this information can be accessed by law enforcement if they have access to your computer, it\u2019s generally subject to the same conditions as other data on your computer and those conditions aren\u2019t the topic at hand.<\/p>\n

In this context, what \u201cweb browsing history\u201d refers to is data which is stored outside your computer by third parties. It turns out there is quite a lot of this kind of data, generally falling into four broad categories:<\/p>\n