Reavy: WebRTC privacy

[Posted September 16, 2015 by n8willis]

At her personal blog, Mozilla's Maire Reavy addresses some common privacy concerns users have brought up regarding WebRTC. The most basic issue is that engaging in a WebRTC chat session can reveal one user's public IP address to the other user in the chat session. As it turns out, there are ways to mitigate the risk. "We’ve added several new privacy controls for WebRTC in Firefox 42. These controls allow add-on developers to build features that give users the ability to selectively disable all or part of WebRTC, and which allow finer control over what information is exposed to JS applications, especially your IP address or addresses. None of these features are enabled by default due to the considerable cost of enabling them to most users (most of them can be also enabled via about:config)."