Firefox users in the United States are getting an extra measure of privacy protection starting this week, the Mozilla Foundation announced Tuesday.
Firefox Desktop Product Development Vice President Selena Deckelmann heralded the rollout of encrypted DNS over HTTPS (DoH) by default in Mozilla's browser.
The DNS, or Domain Name System, is one of the oldest parts of the Internet. It's how "human-friendly" names are converted to the IP addresses needed to reach a website.
Because of the way the Internet was designed decades ago, browsers doing lookups for websites have done so without encryption. Without encryption, devices can collect DNS queries, or even block or change them. What's more, the lookups can be sent to servers that will use them to spy on Internet activity.
"At the creation of the Internet, these kinds of threats to people's privacy and security were known, but not being exploited yet," Deckelmann noted.
"Today, we know that unencrypted DNS is not only vulnerable to spying but is being exploited, and so we are helping the Internet to make the shift to more secure alternatives," she continued.
"We do this by performing DNS lookups in an encrypted HTTPS connection," Deckelmann explained. "This helps hide your browsing history from attackers on the network, helps prevent data collection by third parties on the network that ties your computer to websites you visit."
Although DoH will be activated by default only in the United States, users in other countries can turn it on through Firefox's settings.
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