What is pingsender.exe?
If you are monitoring the network connections of your computer, then it is likely that you witnessed the incomprehensible activity of the Pingsender.exe application. A reasonable question arises: what is it, is it a virus?
Windows Firewall Control, a free add-on utility for quick access to the important options of the regular firewall (firewall, firewall) of the Windows operating system, will help to answer it.
Why it occurs?
Using the firewall, it is easy to find out the remote IP address to which the application is trying to connect, and the organization that has signed the digital certificate EXE files.
In our case, the developer was Mozilla Corporation, and the IP address belongs to the American cloud service giant Amazon Web Services (AWS). After watching the Pingsender process, it can be noted that it is launched when the Firefox browser is closed.
When we use our computer, and we are connected to the Internet, although we do not know it, in the background a wide variety of connections are constantly being made to all types of services and platforms, both to keep the connection active and in the background in order to to be able to monitor the use we make of our computer and our applications, which is known as telemetry. This telemetry is often carried out from processes independent of the browser or the apps we use, such as Pingsender.
It depends on the firewall we use or the program with which we control the access of applications and processes to the internet; we may have sometimes seen how certain processes ask for permission to connect. One of these processes is called ” Pingsender.exe,” a process developed by Mozilla that tries, on the computers of Firefox users, to establish connections to an Amazon IP.
This process is used by Firefox to send the telemetry data, as long as the user has consented, to the Amazon cloud (the Mozilla server) each time the browser is closed. In this way, Mozilla can easily process all this information and use it, for example, to correct possible errors and keep improving the web browser.
The process Pingsender.exe runs completely independently of the browser. However, it is signed by Mozilla, so it is a reliable process and does not pose any risk to our operating system, at least in terms of security. On the subject of privacy, it is something else.
How to disable the “pingsender.exe” process in Windows to prevent Firefox from collecting data about us
Although the pingsender.exe process is safe in the sense that it is not a malware, it is actually a perilous threat to users who are seriously concerned about their privacy. Therefore, if we do not want this process to send data to Mozilla automatically every time we close the browser, we must manually disable it so that this does not continue to happen.
To do this, we must simply enter in the address bar ” about preferences # privacy ” and in the section “Collection and use of Firefox data ” we must uncheck the two boxes that appear to us so that Mozilla does not use telemetry.
Another much more radical option is to disable Pingsender directly from the advanced Firefox options. To do this, we will write in the address bar of the browser ” about config? Filter = toolkit.telemetry.shutdownPingSender.enabled ”and look for the entry ” toolkit.telemetry.shutdownPingSender.enabled ” so that, by double-clicking on it, change its value to “false”.
Then restart your browser and ready. From now on, when you close Firefox, the Pingsender process will not load on our computer and will allow us, in addition to saving memory and processor, to better protect our privacy and save us a series of connections with Amazon servers that have often caused the Internet, after closing the browser, go slower than usual until the data is sent.
Are you a Firefox user? Had you noticed how the Pingsender process loaded on the computer after closing the browser?