Mozilla is introducing a new feature to Firefox aimed at protecting users from bounce trackers, the browser developer has announced. Bounce tracking is a technique where a user clicks a link but ends up reaching their intended destination via an intermediary tracking page. This allows trackers to place and read 'first-party cookies,' which aren’t blocked by the browser, unlike third-party
I don’t pretend to know how any of this works, but the link is obviously already there in the browser, otherwise it couldn’t direct you to it.
But it doesn’t always point to the destination. Instead, it points to another page that then redirects you to the destination.
Your browser does not know the address of the destination, only the addresss of the middleman tracking webpage.
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The point of this is that it’s a redirect. The link isn’t taking you to xyz.com, it’s going to abc.com which redirects to xyz.com. The abc.com server redirects to the second link – there’s no way to know where it’ll take you unless you follow it.
Except if you hover over it, the browser will show you where it’s redirecting to and not the tracking URL. That’s the whole point.