More Privacy on the Phone

As already described in another article, old data should also be deleted on the cell phone from time to time and the free storage space overwritten. The “Data Eraser App – Wipe Data” app from cb innovations is ideal for overwriting free storage space on Android.

But now to the main topic: More privacy on your cell phone is quite difficult to achieve with the standard apps, but fortunately there are also some good open source alternatives such as Firefox. Firefox not only offers the standard browser, but also “Firefox Clear” or “Firefox Focus” for cell phone users. This browser is particularly privacy-oriented and regularly deletes all data immediately after use.

Unfortunately, an old problem still remains: the cache stored on the storage medium. This cache can still be a problem even when deleted. Therefore, it might even be better to simply not write any more cache.

Deactivate Firefox cache or keep Firefox cache only in the working memory

It is indeed possible to prevent writing to the hard disk, but this is somewhat easier to do on the desktop than on a cell phone. The “Firefox Nightly” build, which is actually intended for developers, is required for this on cell phones.

Why? Because about:config has been deactivated in the normal mobile versions.

How can the saving of data on the disk in Firefox be prevented?

First enter about:config in the address bar and acknowledge the warning message.

Then change the following settings as follows:

browser.cache.disk.enable = false
browser.cache.disk.capacity = 0
browser.cache.disk_cache_ssl = false
browser.cache.memory.enable = true

browser.formfill.enable = false
signon.rememberSignons = false
privacy.trackingprotection.enabled = true
privacy.trackingprotection.pbmode.enabled = true
privacy.trackingprotection.socialtracking.enabled = true
datareporting.healthreport.uploadEnabled = false
toolkit.telemetry.enabled = false
toolkit.telemetry.unified = false
toolkit.telemetry.server = ""

The second block has a few more recommendations.

Deactivate Google histories

I can’t put it simply: Deactivate as many Google histories as possible in your Google account settings.