Using Mozilla's "Sync" feature unexpectedly syncs a lot of privacy settings
Firefox has a "Sync" feature. It syncs bookmarks, web history, opened tabs, settings, home page etc. I use this on my regular Firefox (non-TBB) installation to sync bookmarks. Until a while back, it did not sync anything other than bookmarks. That seems to have changed now to include a lot of settings as well.
A few days back, however, I "synced" the TBB expecting to get all my bookmarks. But I immediately noticed that a lot of things had changed, including
- Default Search Engine,
- Privacy Settings (my sync settings had DNT enabled, DNT changed from disabled to enabled when I synced),
- Cookie Settings (cookies were suddenly disabled in TBB, which is how my sync settings were in regular Firefox since I use CookieMonster),
- Homepage (changed from check.torproject to Startpage, which I use as my homepage in regular Firefox)
I am sure there are settings other than the ones mentioned above that get changed in TBB when you sync from your Firefox settings. Obviously, this is bad for anonymity because if everyone starts to use the "sync" function, fingerprinting would be that much easier.
Needless to say, I deleted my TBB folder in Ubuntu and reinstalled it.
Possible solution - disable the "sync" function in TBB?