Today, online privacy and threats like invisible tracking from third parties on the Web seem very abstract. Many of us are either not aware of what\u2019s happening with our online data or we feel powerless because we don\u2019t know what to do. More and more, the Internet is becoming a giant glass house where your personal information is exposed to third parties who collect and use it for their own purposes.<\/p>\n
We recently released Private Browsing with Tracking Protection in Firefox<\/a> – a feature focused on providing anyone using Firefox with meaningful choice over third parties on the Web that might be collecting data without their understanding or control. This is a feature which addresses the need for more control over privacy online but is also connected to an ongoing and important debate around the preservation of a healthy, open Web ecosystem<\/a> and the problems and possible solutions to the content blocking question<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Glass House<\/b><\/p>\n Earlier this month we dedicated a three-day event to the topic of online privacy in Hamburg, Germany. Today, we would like to share some impressions from the event and also an experiment we filmed on the city\u2019s famous Reeperbahn.<\/p>\n Our experiment?<\/p>\n We set out to see if we could explain something that is not easily visible, online privacy, in a very tangible way. We built an apartment fully equipped with everything one needs to enjoy a short trip to Germany\u2019s northern pearl. We made the apartment available to various travelers arriving to stay the night. Once they logged onto the apartment\u2019s Wi-Fi, all the walls were removed, revealing the travelers to onlookers and external commotion caused when their private information turned out to be public.<\/p>\n The travelers\u2019 responses are genuine.<\/p>\n