getting firefox to stop phoning home

I tried K-Meleon out, and it’s good. Really good. But there are certain FF plugins I require that won’t work in it, so it’s a no go. However I am keeping it installed because it’s much faster than FF is, so on the occasions FF pisses me off I’ll just use that. :)

When software “phones home”, that means it’s purposely sending data based on how you use it. With Firefox, the default phone-homes send Google all your RSS feeds, every site you visit and every internet search you make.

Using a network sniffer I examined when Firefox contacts Google, and these are the instances where FF phones home:

Google Safe Browsing

Every web site you visit is checked against a database to determine if it’s “bad” or not. The checking process is a phone home.

How to turn it off:

1. Tools
2. Options
3. Security tab
4. Uncheck “Block reported attack sites”
5. Uncheck “Block reported web forgeries”

Suggested Sites

This phones home in two ways. First is the location bar and second in the search bar.

How to turn it off:

Manage search engines

Get rid of all the search engines, then click “Add more search engines…” at the bottom and add Scroogle. Finally, uncheck “Show search suggestions”.

When done it looks like the screen shot below.

To the best of my knowledge that’s pretty much all you have to do.

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