How in the Tech

Have Some Privacy with the Firefox Referrer Control

By Adam Myers ⋅ November 25, 2008 ⋅ Tags: Firefox, Privacy

Every visit of yours to every website includes a whole whack of extraneous information. Most of us are aware that our IP address is one of those bits if information. As a webmaster, that information is handy but the more useful information is the referrer. The referrer variable is actually the URL or website that a user clicked on in order to get to the destination site. This can be explained more simply with a specific example. A user runs a Google search on the term firefox referrer control and comes across this article. If they click on the search result page, in my server logs I will see that the visit came to this website via Google, and even what search terms they used to find my article. Even if you aren’t a webmaster, you can probably see how valuable this information is. To be thorough, the referrer variable can even be blank which usually signifies that the visitor typed in the URL address directly, rather than following a link.

Firefox RefControl is an extension that does just as the name applies; it controls the referrer information that Firefox passes to websites. Why would you care about this? Well, everyone likes to take stance on privacy on the Internet and this is another tool to help you remain anonymous. I’ve long since given up on Internet privacy; my life has been sold to Google years back. Those that still fight the good fight, this extension could be handy. More practically, some websites check the referrer and serve out different content in response. A real life example of this is the Wall Street Journal who generally serve our partial articles unless you are a subscribed user, that is unless you are referred by digg.com, the social news website. At which point, the articles are available in their entirety.

This is a niche extension but it does serve that niche well.