Firewalla: Keep Your Online Activity Private Newsletter - Oct 4, 2023

Privacy Protection with Firewalla

Firewalla offers powerful yet simple-to-use features that protect your privacy online, whether you're at home, in the office, or on the go. With Firewalla, you can:

• Stop ads from tracking you with Ad Block.
• Keep your website traffic private with DNS over HTTPS or Unbound.
• Encrypt your personal or business traffic with our complete VPN solution.
• Use custom and system Target Lists for additional filtering.

What kinds of tracking can Firewalla protect against?

• Application Layer Tracking – Applications and websites sometimes use trackers (pixels) to send ad clicks and other events to ad platforms.
• DNS Server Tracking - DNS services/servers may track your DNS requests.
• Network-based DNS Tracking – Intermediate networks (such as your ISP) can learn information about what you're doing through your DNS requests.
• ISP/Network Tracking – Networks can use IP flows to guess where your network traffic is going. VPN service providers may also engage in this kind of tracking.
• Tracking from Public Networks – When connected to a public network (such as airport or hotel Wi-Fi), the service provider you use may track your actions, even on purchased Wi-Fi access packages.

Ad Block

Advertisers are constantly attempting to see your online behavior to sell you services and products. Ad Block helps eliminate ads and stop ad providers from tracking your web browsing habits.

DoH and Unbound

Whenever you use the Internet, your device sends DNS requests to retrieve the websites or applications you want to see. Those requests are answered by a DNS server.

Traditionally, DNS requests are sent in plain text. DNS over HTTPS (DoH) encrypts your DNS requests, making DNS exchange more secure and protecting user privacy.

Unbound is a recursive DNS resolver that prevents a single DNS server from having all your DNS records. This helps increase your online privacy and security. 

Firewalla VPN Server

VPNs create connections between your device and a remote server. Firewalla has a built-in VPN Server that allows you to securely access your network no matter where you are.

When traveling or using public Wi-Fi, you can connect to your Firewalla VPN Server to surf the Internet just as safely and easily as if you were at home. With a VPN connection, neither the Wi-Fi operator nor anyone around you can eavesdrop on any of your communications.

If you're working from home, you can connect to your office's Firewalla VPN Server to securely access your work files. You can tell Firewalla to only send work-related traffic over your VPN and keep your personal traffic between you and your ISP.

3rd-Party VPNs with Firewalla VPN Client

Firewalla also offers a VPN Client through which you can connect to other VPN servers. You can also choose to send each device's traffic over different VPNs.

3rd-party VPNs are useful ways to shield your data from your ISP or government. To get multiple devices on one VPN connection, you can use the Firewalla VPN Client to route traffic from each device over your 3rd-party VPN. This is especially useful if you want to get devices that can't install VPN clients onto your VPN.

Target Lists

Firewalla has a large database of dynamic security intel that your box uses to judge the risk of your connections. However, if you have a lot of targets or want to use some other list of targets, we offer the Target List feature. A Target List is a set of targets defined with domain or IP which can be used as a building block to create rules or prioritize a group of targets.

This is part of our Firewalla Weekly Newsletter. You can sign up here https://firewalla.com/weekly.