Ryan Baumann

Mozilla, reading the room extremely well, seemingly just recently flipped the switch to enable-by-default sponsored weather results from AccuWeather in every new Firefox tab you open. Clicking "Learn more" takes you here, with zero information on if your location is sent to AccuWeather every time you open a new tab: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customize-items-on-firefox-new-tab-page

Probably only noticed because I normally have a blank new tab page but this showed up after updating Firefox!

a blank new tab in Firefox, with a weather widget that reads 72F and cloudy. When you hover over it you get a hamburger menu and the tiny label text "AccuWeather - Sponsored". Clicking the menu gives you the options: Change location, Switch to Celsius, Switch to detailed view, Hide weather on New Tab, Learn more

Customize items on your Firefox New Tab page | Firefox Help

Learn how to customize different items on your Firefox New Tab page.

^{support.mozilla.org}

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

Ryan Baumann

1 month ago •

Furthermore, would "hiding weather on new tab" actually stop this feature from still regularly sending my location to AccuWeather? Great question! I have no idea

Ryan Baumann

1 month ago •

After checking about:config, "Hide weather on New Tab" sets the config value "browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.feeds.showWeather" to "false", but leaves "browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.feeds.weatherfeed" as the default of "true". So, my suspicion was correct, #Firefox is still sending your location off every 30 minutes to get the weather in the background by default even if you disable this new widget: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/components/newtab/lib/WeatherFeed.sys.mjs #infosec #privacy

a screenshot of Firefox's about:config after hiding the weather widget, showing weatherfeed unmodified as true and showWeather modified to false.

WeatherFeed.sys.mjs - mozsearch

^{searchfox.org}

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