Protecting your LiveJournal privacy with Firefox

[ciphergoth]

This journal entry describes ways in which people you know may be monitoring the way you use LJ. How often you read their journal, what friends groups you define, and so on.

It's done with what are called "web bugs" - tiny images served from special servers that record this information. You can block the servers that serve the web bugs, but they can always create more servers, so it's a game of "whack-a-mole".

Today I found out about a setting in Firefox that blocks *all* web-bug based tracking, from all websites to all websites, permanently. No longer will people be able to monitor you in this way.

Go to the URL bar and type "about:config". Select the setting "network.http.sendRefererHeader". If it has the value "2", change it to "1". That's it.

Technical details

I'll be setting this on all my browsers ASAP.

Comments

[kimble.livejournal.com]

Hmm, this appears to break Keenspace comics. Anyone got a good idea for doing this on a per-site basis?

[nikolasco.livejournal.com]

I was hoping someone would know of an extension that would do this. I'll just note that it's possible to write one. Whether or not I'll ever get around to it is another matter. If someone else is interested, I can point them in the right direction in the Mozilla jungle.