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Privacy shouldn't be a luxury. Privacy should be accessible to everyone. Hello and welcome to Outside the Fox, where we explore what's happening online and why it matters. I'm Kim Horcher. And I'm Steve Flavin, and there's a new VPN in town, and guess what? It's built in to Firefox. It's kind of a big deal. Yeah, it is one, free, two, built in. You don't have to download anything extra. But today, we're not just talking about one feature. Today, we're actually unpacking our entire privacy toolkit in Firefox, with built in, how it works, and how to actually use it in real life. And to help us do that, we have two very special guests from the Firefox team, Tony and Vesta. Welcome. Thank you for joining us. Hi everyone. Thanks for
having us. I'm Vesta, and the director of products for Firefox ecosystem, and my team is primarily focused on privacy and identity services, and building trust and control in Firefox. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, thank you so much for having us. My name's Tony Amaral Chenodo, and I manage our privacy experiences product management team. Awesome. Well, let's start with the big headline. Firefox now has a built-in VPN. Can you walk us through what that is in plain terms?
Yeah, of course. So, at a high level, our new VPN feature offers a really simple way to hide your IP address while you're browsing inside of Firefox. So, it's built in, meaning no extra downloads, no setup. It's just a toggle and you can switch on and off as you browse different sites. So, normally, when you do visit a website, your IP address is visible to that website. And your IP address is private. It's sort of like your home address, but for the internet, which means that it will tell websites roughly where you are in the world, and it can be used to link your activity over time, so websites can build a profile of you and your activity without your
knowledge. So, what we're doing here is that we are bringing this new capability to Firefox, where we are routing your browsing traffic through a proxy network that replaces or masks your IP address before it reaches a website. So, what the internet sees is a different IP instead of your IP. You're still able to browse normally, do whatever you wanted to do online without any extra effort, but with that extra layer of protection. And we are excited that we're able to offer every user 50 gigs of free VPN protection monthly, which is around 10 times more than other major browsers offer. And we are rolling this out primarily initially in US, France, Germany, and the UK, and then planning to roll it out to Canada and other countries soon after.
I'm curious, why build this directly into the browser instead of asking people to download something separate? Yeah, that's that's a really good question that it that hits at the core of what we're doing here. We decided to build this feature into the browser because most people for most people, if privacy isn't easy, they're just not going to do it. Mhm. So, we've seen this over and over. Most people aren't going to install a separate VPN app, pay for it, configure it. It's just a lot of work. And, you know, on the other hand, every person uses a browser. So, there's a lot more reach, so we kind of thought about, okay, how do we get this protection to everybody? We sort of flipped this model and thought, what if
the privacy is just lived inside the browser? And that's just really aligned with how we're thinking about privacy here at Firefox. We don't think privacy should be a premium feature or something that's just reserved for experts. We really want and believe that privacy should be the default experience and everybody's right. A lot of people care about privacy as theoretically, but don't really act on it. Why is that? I think there's a really big chasm between privacy and convenience. Mhm. And those don't always overlap, unfortunately. And that's really what we try to do with this VPN. But an example of that big chasm is, say I went on vacation and I have these really cool
photos I want to share with my family and friends, and I'm really excited to share them with them. Is if I'm going to go the convenient route, I'm going to go upload them to a large social media platform. And that's where all my friends can see them. That's where they expect to see them. They already have the app. They can easily like them and engage with them. But I've given up the privacy option there, because now I've given over my data over to a large tech company that really, if they change their terms of service, can do whatever they want with those photos. They can use them to train their large language models. They could modify the photos, truly anything they want that's in their terms of service.
But if I go to the other end of the spectrum and I say, you know what, I want to be really private about this, I now need to download a private messaging app. I need to get all my friends and family to download that private messaging app. I now have to choose which family members to send it to. And then now they're starting conversations about the photos, but I just wanted to share it with them for a second. So, you can see this big gap between privacy and convenience, and there's a reason that it exists. It's because big tech companies want that. Because privacy means they don't have access to your data, and access to your data is how they monetize and they make money. So, this can make you feel like you want to give up. My data's already out there.
I don't care. I'm powerless. But you're not. And we're here to help, and that's what really makes Mozilla different, is that we are backed by a nonprofit, a mission-based organization, and we're all trying to make the internet a better place, and that starts with bringing privacy and convenience together. Gosh, it always comes back to money, doesn't it? Well, you know, we're talking a lot about this at Mozilla. You know, we've had conversations about this. It feels like often times privacy tools are built for power users, or you know, in certain cases, are framed as sort of a luxury in the ecosystem. Apple is famously, you know, kind of a luxury branded tech company that is really great about
privacy. I'm a fan, but also it's it kind of goes against our ethos at Mozilla that privacy shouldn't be a luxury. Privacy should be accessible to everyone. And so, Vesta, you mentioned that you know, earlier in the podcast. I'm curious um if you could put a finer point on how we try to make privacy accessible for everyone. Privacy should be the default, and that's what you get right when you download Firefox. You're getting enhanced tracking protection, you're getting the VPN. And I think a good analogy of this is looking at online security. 20 years ago, when we used to all have to, you know, we buy a new computer, we'd be so excited to use it, we spent all this money, then go, "Oh my
god, now we got to go buy antivirus software. And now we have to buy all these additional protections on top of this." And it wasn't things that were right out of the box. And now look at us 20 years later, where we start to see this antivirus, anti-malware, and these protection software built right into the operating system, and now we feel a lot safer when we're browsing online, and that's really shifted our focus over to protecting ourselves from phishing and scams, and now we're starting to see those protections being offered by default as well. But it's all about putting that into the default, and that should be the normal that privacy and security comes first.
The second part of that, though, is that not all protections are going to be something that's just on in the background. There are going to be protections where you have to take those extra steps to protect yourself. And so, how can we make that the fewest amount of steps possible, so that protecting yourself is just a few clicks, and then you're good to go about your browsing and continue to be safe online? 100%. And so, I mean, you're preaching to the choir when it comes to using a VPN. I'm a big fan myself of our Mozilla VPN offering. But to zoom out a little bit for people maybe less familiar, when would someone actually use a VPN,
and what are some real-world moments where it matters? I mean, there are a lot of very real everyday moments. So, the most obvious one is when you're on public Wi-Fi. So, this happens often. You know, you could be at an airport, a cafe, a hotel, and these networks are basically shared with strangers. So, you don't really know who's on them. So, by using a VPN, you just add that extra layer of protection there. Another big one that is my favorite is travel, because it's not just about privacy, but also convenience. So, let's say you're traveling abroad, you're, you know, you still like you have some regular websites that you browse on a
daily basis, and suddenly you see that those websites behaving differently or even breaking because you're not in your home location. So, if you have a VPN, you can change your location back to your home country, and that fixes your experience, which can be surprisingly useful. There other use cases as well. You know, just any kind of private activity, someone may want to have that extra layer of protection when they're shopping for something private or health-related research, or in some cases, you know, you may want to have you may have a desire to bypass network restrictions when there's censorship involved. And essentially, what you're doing is you're reducing one of the key signals that websites use to track you, which is your
IP and your location. And I do think it's important to say that, you know, privacy isn't about hiding or doing anything something wrong, something that you're doing wrong. It's really about having control. Excellent. But just to clarify, how is this different from a full device VPN? Yeah, so I think the is the way to think about it is the free built-in VPN that we're offering, um which is our new offering protects your browsing inside Firefox, but it doesn't protect other apps on your device or just your entire device with internet connection. A full VPN on the other hand protects everything on your device. Now, for those of our users who are looking for that broader full device
experience, we do offer the standalone subscription product that you alluded to earlier, the Mozilla VPN, which offers full device and unlimited protection across apps, operating systems, multiple devices. So, we really do think of these two products as complimentary. So, the built-in VPN, it's super simple to use, it's free, it's for your everyday browsing. Mozilla VPN is a full device standalone application. It's for people who want a more comprehensive protection. So, it's depending on your needs, you might pick the level of privacy and protection that suits you. Awesome. Well, let's zoom out a little bit. VPN is just one tool, and you alluded to this a little bit, but what are what's already built into Firefox that people might not realize
they have? My favorite is enhanced tracking protection. I got to work on it years ago, and there's a brilliant team working on it right now. It's enabled by default, so the moment that you download by download Firefox, you're getting enhanced tracking protection the moment you go to a new webpage. And so, what that allows you to do with enhanced tracking protection is it has a few different protections built in by default. First is total cookie protection. So, if you visit website A, a lot of times it'll install a cookie, and that can contain different browsing information. Sometimes website B is going to see that cookie and start to make a profile and understand and be able to track you. What total cookie
protection does is we kind of we call it cookie jars, and it's actually placing website cookie one jar in its own jar, so website B can't see the first website. We also have fingerprinting protection, which makes it where websites are very crafty, and they can actually try and tell who you are based off of your display size, your window size, all these little tricky intricate things, and we try and block those to make sure that we're maintaining your privacy. And then, a bonus on top, sometimes websites are using your computing power and your internet as well, too, to mine for cryptocurrency, and we actually block that by default, as well, too.
My second favorite thing that's right out of the box that you can use in Firefox is email masking. So, email masking allows me to get out an email mask instead of my real email address. That way, I can protect it from spam, I can protect it from being tracked, and if that email address ever gets exposed in a breach, it means that it's it's just out there, and it doesn't matter because you scammers don't have my real email address. So, it's a really big protection and super easy to use. And the third one is the trust panel. It's a little shield icon that you'll see when you're in Firefox at the top search bar, and this is when you're browsing around on the web, we'll alert
you if there's anything that needs your attention. So, you can always see that Firefox has your back and is out there to protect you on the web. Let's say you're a hypothetical person, and your name is Kim, and you want to improve your privacy today. But you want to get your dopamine going, so what are some easy wins? The first easiest win is so simple, download Firefox. Again, it's private by default right out of the bat, so you're going to get all of these really great things from the moment you download Firefox. You're not having to download a
bunch of other software, taking up room on your phone or your computer. It's one download, and you get a lot of great things out of it. My second one, and this is I kind of joke that this is like when you go to the dentist and they're like, "Tony, you're not flossing enough." This is my flossing recommendation, which is to make sure you're using strong and unique passwords on every single site. And I know that can feel hard. You're like, "Well, I have my password that I use, and I just change it a little bit for this site." It's not good enough, unfortunately. And what's really great is that Firefox actually has a built-in credential manager that will recommend secure and safe passwords for you, and then store
them. Once I started using it, I'm no longer clicking the forget password button every other day. It really works well. Again, if that is privacy and convenience coming together super easily. My third is around fishing and online scams. Unfortunately, they're getting a lot worse right now, especially with the advancements in AI. Before, I think we could all kind of joke about the same scams and say, "Oh, we're getting that one again." But now, they're becoming so far advanced with AI and deepfakes, it's getting harder to tell what's real or not. We're starting to see scam artists use caller ID spoofing, so it looks like the call is actually coming from my bank. People
are reporting that their family members are calling asking for money, and turns out that it's a deepfake. My biggest recommendation is when it's a company calling you, and they're asking for any sort of information, hang up and go to the company's official website, find their phone number, and call them directly and bring up the case. If it is with a family member, some prevention steps that you can do is sit down with a family member and align on a code word, two code words with each other. And those code words are really important. It shouldn't be your dog, your family, your original street you grew up on. It should be two extremely random words that only you two will know. And so, if they're ever calling asking for money or needing
help, ask them for the code word, and then you respond back with your code word, as well, too, so you can identify each other. The next advice is freezing your credit. I know that's a little bit more US-centric, but this can prevent bad actors from taking out new credit cards, loans, or lines of credit in your name. And then, my favorite and one of the easiest things to do, again, is use a trusted VPN, which is going to be built directly right into Firefox. Those are all Yeah.
Jinx. Those are all great tips. Um, you're definitely speaking to me. Shout out to password managers. I've been on probably two episodes at least two episodes talking about password managers, even though I am not an expert at password management, but I'm just a big fan. Um, so are there any underrated features in Firefox that you think people should be using more? Yeah, two of them that I think are really great to use is Mozilla Monitor, which is our breach monitoring service. So, you can put your email address in and find out if you've been part of a breach, but we're also going to alert
you and email you if you're in any breaches that come up in our database. And we're not just going to stop there. Again, we want to remove that barrier of privacy, security, and convenience and put it all together. When you're part of a breach, it's overwhelming, it can feel kind of scary, you don't know what to do next. We hold your hand in what we call the guided experience, where after you've been part of a breach, we're going to take you step by step and tell you exactly what to do and kind of hold your hand through that process. And then, my second one is sync. So, a lot of people don't think about sync, which is syncing your password, syncing your bookmarks and history across devices as a privacy feature, but it
actually we offer the most private sync and backup method, where nobody except for you can access the data of your websites that you visited, your bookmarks, and your password. Even if you ask us to try and access that, we can't. Only the user can because it is encrypted at the end. All right. I like that. it. I like the sound of that. One last question before we wrap up, what's next for privacy in Firefox, and what's on the horizon that you're both excited about? So, there are a few things coming up that we are very excited about.
They all ladder up to this general idea that we were talking about today, which is making privacy feel really effortless and just not something that you have to manage. So, on the VPN side, we're just getting started. We're expanding to new locals, to more regions, bringing VPN to mobile, which we're very excited about, and also adding just more user control, like being able to giving people the ability to choose their location or set their preferences per site. So, that's all coming this year. Beyond VPN, we're generally looking into ways of being more proactive and not just reactive to protect our users. Because what we're noticing is that people often go looking for privacy when something's already
happened, and it's already too late. So, they're looking for those have to proactively go look for those privacy and security tools when they when it may not no longer be useful to them. We want Firefox to surface those risks as you browse. So, we're also looking into just being more awareness and clarity to how we're protecting our users and making sure that they feel good when they're using Firefox. We want to move away, in other words, from a world where privacy is just a set of tools to a world where we're proactively, you know, doing the work for you, so you don't have to think about it. Well, I can't think of a better note to end on. Thank you so much, Vesta and Tony, for taking this very important deep dive with us.
Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks for having us. We love the chance to talk to people who love Firefox and build the best products we can. Absolutely. Well, we all know that privacy can be overwhelming, but it doesn't have to be. And what we want to know is what is your go-to way to stay protected online. Let us know in the comments. Subscribe to the channel, and be sure to download Firefox because, you know, it's the best. We'll see you next time.
