Have you heard about 'Salt Typhoon'? This is a chinese hacking operation which infiltrated 200 companies across 80 countries in 2024. The CIA casually stated that they now probably have information on every american. How? Well, many of the companies infiltrated were large, but also, distribution of personal information on the web via 'data broking' is widespread. This is when a company - say, Amazon - sells anonymized data about a large number of users to a third party - maybe a government actor, or a private company - ostensibly for market research purposes. The problem is that your data can be easily de-anonymized, if the buyer owns a website you have an account with. They find out the exact times you've logged in, in the past, then compare that against the anonymized data in order to identify the user. This is one method of several.
So any state actor can use this anonymized data, plus login times found in breaches like the ones orchestrated by Salt Typhoon, to identify vast numbers of users, their web browsing habits, what websites they visit, their personal statistics and more. How is this useful? Well, if you're trying to manipulate people in a foreign power hierarchy, you want to find out what they don't want others to know (web browsing habits, emails etc) and what they are vulnerable to (how many kids they have, their partner, and suchforth). Which brings us to the issue of browser privacy. Most of us are not important enough for any government to care about, let alone investigate, but still, its nice to be cautious sometimes. Microsoft's 'Edge' browser, their newer Outlook email client, and Google's Chrome browser send information about which websites you visit, what you type and when, back to their servers. According to both companies, the data is only used for their targeted ad services, but both have been known to lie (Chrome was found to be sending information back to base even when users were browsing in 'incognito mode').
Mozilla's Firefox browser, unfortunately, has started sending information home too; purportedly to gather data to power their new AI initiative. Firefox has been getting more annoying and confusing for mainstream users for years, and I think for many this has been the last straw. Which leaves us with only one choice; alternative browsers. I looked at a bunch so you don't have to, and the best one for most users is Librewolf. This is based on Firefox's source code, but with telemetry and various other annoyances disabled, as well as privacy-focused features enabled by default. It includes an ad-blocker and is compatible with Firefox's extensions/bookmarks. Other alternatives are numerous but boil down to a few solid candidates:
So there you have it. My recommendation for a new web browser that won't get you tracked so easily in 2025 is Librewolf. Or you can stick with Edge and have that god-awful page of clickbait news rocket into your vision every time you open a new browser tab.
- written by Matt Bentley