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New Mozilla bundle includes VPN, Firefox Relay with phone number masking

Source: https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2022/11/mozilla-the-best-gift-for-anyone-who-wants-to-feel-safer-when-they-go-online-mozilla-privacy-products/

Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox browser, rolled out a new bundled subscription for two of its privacy-oriented products. Now, customers can get Mozilla VPN and Firefox relay for one price.

If you’re not familiar with either product, here’s a quick summary. Mozilla VPN is, well, a VPN service based on WireGuard and Mullvad. The plan covers up to five devices, offers over 500 servers in over 30 countries, and there are no bandwidth restrictions. Importantly, Mozilla promises it doesn’t log network activity and that Mozilla VPN offers device-level encryption. It came to Canada in July 2020 and later expanded to support Mac and Linux.

Mozilla VPN on its own typically costs $4.99 USD per month, billed annually at $59.88 (about $80 CAD) for 12 months.

Firefox Relay, on the other hand, is a web app that lets users create email “masks,” which are alternate emails, so they don’t have to give out their actual email. Relay recently expanded to include phone number masking for those who pay for Relay Premium (which is also included in the new bundle).

Free Firefox Relay users got up to five email masks. There are two tiers of Relay Premium; the first gives access to unlimited email masks and additional features like the ability to block promotional emails or respond to forwarded emails. It costs $1.99 USD ($2.66 CAD) per month or $0.99 USD ($1.32) per month with yearly billing. It jumps up to $3.99 USD ($5.34 CAD) per month with yearly billing to get the phone number masking.

However, with Mozilla’s new bundle, you can get both Mozilla VPN and Relay Premium with phone number masking for $6.99 USD ($9.35 CAD) per month or $83.88 USD ($112.26 CAD) per year. You can sign up for the bundle from either the Mozilla VPN website or the Firefox Relay website.

Header image credit: Mozilla

Source: Mozilla

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Mobile Syrup

Firefox Relay gives you a burner phone number to give out online

Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox browser, rolled out a new update to another privacy-focused service called ‘Firefox Relay’ that enables users to hide their real phone number with a burner number provided by Relay.

Firefox Relay, if you haven’t heard of it, is a web app (and browser extension) that lets you generate email “masks” — virtual email addresses that you can hand out to websites instead of your real email. The email masks then forward emails to your real email address, allowing you to maintain a degree of separation between your real email and the services you give an email to (of course, you can also block emails coming from a mask, giving you a great option for anything you suspect will bombard you with spam).

Now, Mozilla has expanded that idea to phone numbers. Through Firefox Relay, people can create a phone number mask to give out online so they can keep their real phone numbers private.

Given that many people use their phone numbers for two-factor authentication (2FA), keeping a private phone number is a good idea. SIM swap fraud, which involves fraudsters stealing your phone number to gain access to 2FA codes, is all too common — minimizing exposure is a great way to help combat it. Of course, the phone number mask is also helpful if you need to give your number to a company you suspect will use it to send you spam (or sell it to someone who will).

How Firefox Relay phone numbers work

Currently, Firefox Relay phone numbers are only available in the U.S. and Canada. To get one, head to ‘relay.firefox.com‘ and then sign up for a free account, or sign in if you already have one. It’s worth noting that you can use Relay for free, but with a limit of five email masks, among other restrictions.

Click the purple ‘Upgrade’ button to view the three Relay tiers. To get a phone number, you’ll need to get the ‘Email & phone protection’ tier, which costs $4.99/mo (or $3.99/mo if you go with annual billing). That gives you access to one phone number mask and generates a number for you to use.

Image credit: Mozilla

Each month, Relay subscribers get up to 50 minutes of incoming calls and 75 text messages for the phone number mask. Mozilla said in a blog post that it’s exploring ways to expand the feature with outbound calls and texts in the future and bring it to other regions.

Moreover, you will need to verify your actual phone number with Firefox Relay so that it can forward the calls and texts to you. Once set up, you’ll receive calls and texts from the phone number mask on your phone, with no additional apps required. Plus, you can use Relay to manage who can call and text your number to cut down on unwanted spam.

You can learn more about Firefox Relay phone numbers from this blog post, or check out Relay for yourself here.

Source: Mozilla

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Mobile Syrup

Mozilla rolling out Total Cookie Protection feature to all Firefox users

Mozilla announced that it will start rolling out its ‘Total Cookie Protection’ (TCP) feature by default to all desktop Firefox users worldwide.

In a blog post about the feature, Mozilla detailed how TCP will improve user privacy by confining cookies to the website that created them. Mozilla describes the feature as giving each website its own cookie jar, rather than letting websites share one giant cookie jar (check the illustration above).

This approach to cookies makes it more difficult for trackers to link user activity across websites:

“Any time a website, or third-party content embedded in a website, deposits a cookie in your browser, that cookie is confined to the cookie jar assigned to only that website. No other websites can reach into the cookie jars that don’t belong to them and find out what the other websites’ cookies know about you — giving you freedom from invasive ads and reducing the amount of information companies gather about you.”

Mozilla says that TCP helps prevent the worst privacy problems of third-party cookies while also allowing those cookies to fulfill some less invasive use cases, such as analytics.

However, Firefox isn’t the only browser taking on third-party cookies. Google previously announced plans to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome but has delayed the move until 2023. Apple’s Safari also offers ‘Intelligent Tracking Prevention’ that helps prevent cross-site tracking.

TCP was first made available in Firefox back in May as an opt-in feature while Mozilla tested it. Today’s announcement will shift the feature from opt-in to on-by-default, which is a big step forward.

Unfortunately, not all Firefox users will have TCP. Notably, mobile versions of the Firefox browser don’t have TCP — at least, for now. Mozilla’s chief security officer, Marshall Erwin, told The Verge that there’s a different timeline for bringing TCP to Firefox on Android. TCP is available on ‘Firefox Focus,’ a version of mobile Firefox that’s all about privacy. However, Erwin also noted that Firefox users on iOS won’t be able to use TCP, citing Apple’s restriction that forces iOS web browsers to use the WebKit browser engine (the same one used by Safari).

TCP will be available in the latest version of Firefox, although it seems unclear how users will be able to verify if the feature is enabled. Previously, users who were invited to test TCP could check whether it was enabled by heading to Settings > Privacy & Security > Enhanced Tracking Protection. Although I’m running the latest version of Firefox, I wasn’t able to find TCP in my settings, although perhaps I’ve jumped the gun on checking since Mozilla only just announced the rollout.

You can learn more about how TCP works here.

Header image credit: Mozilla

Source: Mozilla Via: The Verge

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Mobile Syrup

Mozilla added its VPN to the excellent Multi-Account Containers add-on for Firefox

Mozilla is making its ‘Multi-Account Containers’ add-on for Firefox more powerful by allowing users to combine containers with a virtual private network (VPN).

Multi-Account Containers, for those unfamiliar with the add-on, allows Firefox users to “contain” different online accounts into separate spaces, all within a single browser window. Containers also isolate browsing history, cookies, tracking information, and more, making them great for privacy.

For example, if you have multiple accounts for an online service like email, Multi-Account Containers would let you log in to those accounts without having to deal with annoying account switching or other issues.

Multi-Account Containers have been available as a Firefox add-on since 2017, but there are several other extensions that leverage the capability as well. I’ve used Firefox containers for a while now, but I haven’t installed that specific extension. Instead, a combo of Mozilla’s ‘Facebook Container‘ add-on and the ‘Temporary Container‘ add-on has worked fine for me.

The former automatically opens Facebook pages in a separate container to help prevent the company from tracking you across the web, while the latter lets me create temporary containers with the click of a button that gets deleted when I’m done with them. Beyond that, I use a ‘Work’ container and a ‘Personal’ container to help keep my various work and personal accounts separate.

Image credit: Mozilla

Anyway, the new VPN capability only adds to the already excellent capabilities of Multi-Account Containers by allowing users to set specific VPN settings for each container. For example, you could set your ‘Banking’ container to always open using a VPN located in your home country while you use a different container tab using a VPN located in the U.S. to browse the American Netflix catalogue. It’s worth noting that if you don’t use Mozilla’s VPN service, you can click the ‘Advanced Proxy Settings’ button in Multi-Account Containers to set any proxy you want.

Alongside the Multi-Account Containers and VPN crossover, Mozilla announced that its VPN ‘multi-hop’ feature, which lets users route traffic through two different servers, is now available on Android and iOS.

You can learn more about using Multi-Account Containers with VPNs here.

Source: Mozilla Via: The Verge