Your IP address isn’t the only thing that can give your identity away online.
For example, tracking cookies and browser fingerprinting allow advertisers and malicious third parties to track your internet activity.
Luckily, Firefox is one of the more private and secure browsers we’ve tested. However, it still requires some configuration to optimize it for privacy.
First of all, you need to disable telemetry, which Mozilla uses to collect diagnostic information from your browser.
To disable telemetry:
- Select the ‘hamburger menu’ in the top right hand corner of your browser window.

- Navigate to Options > Privacy & Security > Firefox Data Collection and Use.
- Make sure that every box in this section is unticked.

How to disable Telemetry in Firefox.
Firefox includes a great feature called Enhanced Tracking Protection.
This feature blocks trackers, cookies, fingerprinting techniques (which can be used to identify you even while a VPN is running), and cryptominers.
To enable Enhanced Tracking Protection:
- Select the ‘hamburger menu’ menu in the top right-hand corner of your screen.
- Navigate to Options > Privacy & Security > Enhanced Tracking Protection.
- Choose your protection mode: strict, standard, or custom.
There are different modes available for different risk models: strict, standard, and custom. In our experience the ‘strict’ mode will break some web pages, but is generally quite stable.

How to enable tracking protection in Firefox.
If you encounter a problem, you can always disable content blocking for specific sites by clicking on the shield symbol to the left of the URL bar.
Finally, you can also change your default search engine from Google to a more private alternative, like DuckDuckGo or Startpage.
To change your default search engine:
- Select the settings menu in the top right hand corner of your screen.
- Navigate to Preferences > Search > Default Search Engine.
- Choose your preferred search engine from the drop-down menu.