Privacy Protector

How to unlock Privacy Protector in Cheevos by checking about:protections, Firefox's tracker report. Worth 10 XP.

The story

Partner. You checked the score. Cache is very fond of this particular score.

Every time you browse with Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection turned on, which it is by default, the browser is quietly blocking companies that try to follow you from site to site without asking. Cookies that track your movement across the web. Fingerprinting scripts. Cryptominers riding along on pages that have nothing to do with mining anything. Firefox counts all of it, and it keeps that count somewhere you can actually go look at.

You went and looked. The number on that page is a tally of times something tried to follow you and got turned away at the door.

Cache finds this number deeply satisfying, in the specific way he finds any evidence of something being kept safe deeply satisfying. He maintains his own tracker blocklist too, built from everything he has observed crawling around the parts of the internet he frequents, and it is considerably larger than Firefox's. He has been meaning to propose a merge. He has not gotten around to it. He will.

The catalog entry

ABOUT:PROTECTIONS Acquired: Visited the Firefox privacy protections report. Condition: Protected. Trackers neutralized. Rarity: Uncommon. Most people never check the score. Cache's Notes: The number on this page is a count of times someone tried to follow you without permission and Firefox said no. Cache finds this number very satisfying. He has his own tracker blocklist. It is larger than Firefox's. He is working on a merge.

Spoiler: how to unlock it

Checking your protection tally takes one visit.

  1. Open Firefox.
  2. Type about:protections into the address bar and press Enter, or click the shield icon at the left of the address bar and choose "Protections Dashboard."
  3. Review your tracker blocking totals for the week and by category.

about:protections shows a dashboard summarizing what Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection has blocked, broken down into categories like social media trackers, cross-site tracking cookies, fingerprinters, and cryptominers, along with a running weekly total. It also links to Firefox Monitor, which checks whether your email addresses have appeared in known data breaches. Enhanced Tracking Protection works by comparing requested resources against curated blocklists (based on Disconnect's tracking protection list) and blocking known trackers before they can load, all without requiring the user to install a separate extension.

Where it fits in the Stash

Cache files this next to his own private blocklist, two collections built for the same reason: keeping track of who tried to follow you and stopping them from doing it again. To meet the raccoon building a merge request, read the story.