Facebook is at it again, encrypting its URLs in an effort to bypass the privacy protections afforded by Brave and Firefox.
According to Ghacks, the issue stems from changes Firefox and Brave made to strip out tracking parameters from URLs. Tracking parameters are trailing characters in a URL that provide no benefit to the user, designed to help the website track them. To get around Brave and Firefox stripping out the tracking parameters, Facebook is working to encrypt its URLs.
Facebook is specifically encrypting the URLS rather than simply changing their parameters in an effort to prevent the browser makers from adapting. URL stripping is based on known tracking parameters. Once Facebook changes the parameters, the browser makers would simply adapt and filter out the new ones. Encrypting the URLs makes it exponentially more difficult, if not impossible, for the browser makers to adapt.
Facebook has a long and well-established reputation for ignoring privacy and going to great lengths to collect any and all information it can on users. Its latest effort completely ignores users’ preferences by bypassing protections they have opted to use. What’s worse, the company has shown the rest of the industry how to bypass this protection.
