How to enable Redirect Tracking Protection in Firefox

[harlan4096]

Mozilla released Firefox 79.0 to the stable channel recently and one of the main changes of that release improved the browser's tracking protection feature.

Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0 introduced support for preventing an advanced tracking technique called redirect tracking. Redirect Tracking is used to bypass a browser's mechanisms to block online tracking. While browser's may block third-party cookies, redirect tracking basically adds the tracker's site to the navigational event to make it first party in the context.

So, instead of visiting Site B from Site A right away, you would be taken to Site T as well (Site A > Site T > Site B) with T being the tracker site. Site T would just load briefly and then redirect to the actual target.

Mozilla notes on its developer site:
 

Redirect trackers work by forcing you to make an imperceptible and momentary stopover to their website as part of that journey. So instead of navigating directly from the review website to the retailer, you’ll end up navigating to the redirect tracker first rather than to the retailer.

This means that the tracker is loaded as a first party. The redirect tracker associates tracking data with the identifiers they have stored in their first-party cookies and then forwards you to the retailer.

 Firefox's redirect tracking protection clears cookies and site data from trackers regularly provided that the preference network.cookie.cookieBehavior is set to the value 4 or 5.

You can check the value of the preference by loading about:config in the browser's address bar and searching for the preference. Mozilla will introduce support for the values 1 and 3 in Firefox 80. Firefox users may configure the browser's tracking protection feature on about:preferences#privacy.
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