{"id":3028,"date":"2014-11-12T06:36:54","date_gmt":"2014-11-11T19:36:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/?p=3028"},"modified":"2014-11-12T07:54:30","modified_gmt":"2014-11-11T20:54:30","slug":"quantifying-the-effects-of-firefoxs-tracking-protection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/2014\/11\/12\/quantifying-the-effects-of-firefoxs-tracking-protection\/","title":{"rendered":"Quantifying the effects of Firefox&#8217;s Tracking Protection"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A number of people at Mozilla are working on a wonderful privacy initiative called <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/privacy\/2014\/11\/10\/introducing-polaris-privacy-initiative-to-accelerate-user-focused-privacy-online\/\">Polaris<\/a>. This will include activities such as Mozilla hosting its own high-capacity <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eff.org\/torchallenge\/what-is-tor.html\">Tor middle relays<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>But the part of Polaris I&#8217;m most interested in is <a href=\"http:\/\/monica-at-mozilla.blogspot.com.au\/2014\/11\/tracking-protection-in-firefox.html\">Tracking Protection<\/a>, which is a Firefox feature that will make it trivial for users to avoid many forms of online tracking. This not only gives users better privacy; experiments have shown it also speeds up the loading of the median page by 20%! That&#8217;s an incredible combination.<\/p>\n<h3>An experiment<\/h3>\n<p>I decided to evaluate the effectiveness of Tracking Protection. To do this, I used <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mozilla.org\/en-US\/lightbeam\/\">Lightbeam<\/a>, a Firefox extension designed specifically to record third-party tracking. On November 2nd, I used a trunk build of the <a href=\"https:\/\/hg.mozilla.org\/integration\/mozilla-inbound\/\">mozilla-inbound repository<\/a> and did the following steps.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Start Firefox with a new profile.<\/li>\n<li>Install Lightbeam from addons.mozilla.org.<\/li>\n<li>Visit the following sites, but don&#8217;t interact with them at all:\n<ol>\n<li>google.com<\/li>\n<li>techcrunch.com<\/li>\n<li>dictionary.com (which redirected to dictionary.reference.com)<\/li>\n<li>nytimes.com<\/li>\n<li>cnn.com<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<li>Open Lightbeam in a tab, and go to the &#8220;List&#8221; view.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I then repeated these steps, but before visiting the sites I added the following step.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Open about:config and toggle privacy.trackingprotection.enabled to<br \/>\n&#8220;true&#8221;.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>Results with Tracking Protection turned off<\/h3>\n<p>The sites I visited directly are marked as &#8220;Visited&#8221;. All the third-party sites are marked as &#8220;Third Party&#8221;.<\/p>\n<pre>Connected with 86 sites\r\n\r\nType            Website                Sites Connected\r\n----            -------                ---------------\r\nVisited         google.com              3\r\nThird Party     gstatic.com             5\r\nVisited         techcrunch.com         25\r\nThird Party     aolcdn.com              1\r\nThird Party     wp.com                  1\r\nThird Party     gravatar.com            1\r\nThird Party     wordpress.com           1\r\nThird Party     twitter.com             4\r\nThird Party     google-analytics.com    3\r\nThird Party     scorecardresearch.com   6\r\nThird Party     aol.com                 1\r\nThird Party     questionmarket.com      1\r\nThird Party     grvcdn.com              1\r\nThird Party     korrelate.net           1\r\nThird Party     livefyre.com            1\r\nThird Party     gravity.com             1\r\nThird Party     facebook.net            1\r\nThird Party     adsonar.com             1\r\nThird Party     facebook.com            4\r\nThird Party     atwola.com              4\r\nThird Party     adtech.de               1\r\nThird Party     goviral-content.com     7\r\nThird Party     amgdgt.com              1\r\nThird Party     srvntrk.com             2\r\nThird Party     voicefive.com           1\r\nThird Party     bluekai.com             1\r\nThird Party     truste.com              2\r\nThird Party     advertising.com         2\r\nThird Party     youtube.com             1\r\nThird Party     ytimg.com               1\r\nThird Party     5min.com                1\r\nThird Party     tacoda.net              1\r\nThird Party     adadvisor.net           2\r\nThird Party     dictionary.com          1\r\nVisited         reference.com          32\r\nThird Party     sfdict.com              1\r\nThird Party     amazon-adsystem.com     1\r\nThird Party     thesaurus.com           1\r\nThird Party     quantserve.com          1\r\nThird Party     googletagservices.com   1\r\nThird Party     googleadservices.com    1\r\nThird Party     googlesyndication.com   3\r\nThird Party     imrworldwide.com        3\r\nThird Party     doubleclick.net         5\r\nThird Party     legolas-media.com       1\r\nThird Party     googleusercontent.com   1\r\nThird Party     exponential.com         1\r\nThird Party     twimg.com               1\r\nThird Party     tribalfusion.com        2\r\nThird Party     technoratimedia.com     2\r\nThird Party     chango.com              1\r\nThird Party     adsrvr.org              1\r\nThird Party     exelator.com            1\r\nThird Party     adnxs.com               1\r\nThird Party     securepaths.com         1\r\nThird Party     casalemedia.com         2\r\nThird Party     pubmatic.com            1\r\nThird Party     contextweb.com          1\r\nThird Party     yahoo.com               1\r\nThird Party     openx.net               1\r\nThird Party     rubiconproject.com      2\r\nThird Party     adtechus.com            1\r\nThird Party     load.s3.amazonaws.com   1\r\nThird Party     fonts.googleapis.com    2\r\nVisited         nytimes.com            21\r\nThird Party     nyt.com                 2\r\nThird Party     typekit.net             1\r\nThird Party     newrelic.com            1\r\nThird Party     moatads.com             2\r\nThird Party     krxd.net                2\r\nThird Party     dynamicyield.com        2\r\nThird Party     bizographics.com        1\r\nThird Party     rfihub.com              1\r\nThird Party     ru4.com                 1\r\nThird Party     chartbeat.com           1\r\nThird Party     ixiaa.com               1\r\nThird Party     revsci.net              1\r\nThird Party     chartbeat.net           2\r\nThird Party     agkn.com                1\r\nVisited         cnn.com                14\r\nThird Party     turner.com              1\r\nThird Party     optimizely.com          1\r\nThird Party     ugdturner.com           1\r\nThird Party     akamaihd.net            1\r\nThird Party     visualrevenue.com       1\r\nThird Party     batpmturner.com         1\r\n<\/pre>\n<h3>Results with Tracking Protection turned on<\/h3>\n<pre>Connected with 33 sites\r\n\r\nVisited         google.com              3\r\nThird Party     google.com.au           0\r\nThird Party     gstatic.com             1\r\nVisited         techcrunch.com         12\r\nThird Party     aolcdn.com              1\r\nThird Party     wp.com                  1\r\nThird Party     wordpress.com           1\r\nThird Party     gravatar.com            1\r\nThird Party     twitter.com             4\r\nThird Party     grvcdn.com              1\r\nThird Party     korrelate.net           1\r\nThird Party     livefyre.com            1\r\nThird Party     gravity.com             1\r\nThird Party     facebook.net            1\r\nThird Party     aol.com                 1\r\nThird Party     facebook.com            3\r\nThird Party     dictionary.com          1\r\nVisited         reference.com           5\r\nThird Party     sfdict.com              1\r\nThird Party     thesaurus.com           1\r\nThird Party     googleusercontent.com   1\r\nThird Party     twimg.com               1\r\nVisited         nytimes.com             3\r\nThird Party     nyt.com                 2\r\nThird Party     typekit.net             1\r\nThird Party     dynamicyield.com        2\r\nVisited         cnn.com                 7\r\nThird Party     turner.com              1\r\nThird Party     optimizely.com          1\r\nThird Party     ugdturner.com           1\r\nThird Party     akamaihd.net            1\r\nThird Party     visualrevenue.com       1\r\nThird Party     truste.com              1\r\n<\/pre>\n<h3>\u00a0Discussion<\/h3>\n<p>86 site connections were reduced to 33. No wonder it&#8217;s a performance improvement as well as a privacy improvement. The only effect I could see on content was that some ads on some of the sites weren&#8217;t shown; all the primary site content was still present.<\/p>\n<p>google.com was the only site that didn&#8217;t trigger Tracking Protection (i.e. the shield icon didn&#8217;t appear in the address bar).<\/p>\n<p>The results are quite variable. When I repeated the experiment the number of third-party sites without Tracking Protection was sometimes as low as 55, and with Tracking Protection it was sometimes as low as 21. I&#8217;m not entirely sure what causes the variation.<\/p>\n<p>If you want to try this experiment yourself, note that Lightbeam was <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/mozilla\/lightbeam\/issues\/622\">broken by a recent change<\/a>. If you are using mozilla-inbound, revision db8ff9116376 is the one immediate preceding the breakage. Hopefully this will be fixed soon. I also found Lightbeam&#8217;s graph view to be unreliable. And note that the privacy.trackingprotection.enabled preference was recently renamed browser.polaris.enabled. <strong>[Update: that is not quite right; Monica Chew has clarified the preferences situation in the comments below.]<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Finally, Tracking Protection is under active development, and I&#8217;m not sure which version of Firefox it will ship in. In the meantime, if you want to try it out, get a copy of <a href=\"http:\/\/nightly.mozilla.org\/\">Nightly<\/a> and follow <a href=\"http:\/\/monica-at-mozilla.blogspot.com.au\/2014\/11\/tracking-protection-in-firefox.html\">these instructions<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A number of people at Mozilla are working on a wonderful privacy initiative called Polaris. This will include activities such as Mozilla hosting its own high-capacity Tor middle relays. But the part of Polaris I&#8217;m most interested in is Tracking Protection, which is a Firefox feature that will make it trivial for users to avoid [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":139,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,311,49274],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3028"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/139"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3028"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3028\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}