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Found secret hidden Firefox browsed screenshots

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I primarily use Firefox as my browser on my newer iMac with mountain lion. I had accidentally deleted some family photos from my desktop and used a recovery tool program to scrub my hard drive for recently deleted images. The program worked very good as I was able to recover my deleted family pictures but I had to go through hundreds of images to find them. In those hundreds of images I went through, I found screenshots of my Firefox activity from banking sessions, to amazon shopping, to google searches. I was stunned. They were only screenshots of Firefox browsing sessions. Hundreds. All taken without my knowledge. I clear my data often on Firefox. Cookies, cache, history, etc. I clear everything. Does anyone know why this is happening and how to stop it? It's definitely a security issue, a lot of the screenshots even showed "sign on" screenshots of banking sessions and amazon user names, email log-ins, etc. I don't know where the screenshots are stored, like I said I used a deleted image recovery program and it doesn't tell you, it just finds files. I scoured my computer looking for jpgs, pngs, etc and couldn't find anything on my own.

I primarily use Firefox as my browser on my newer iMac with mountain lion. I had accidentally deleted some family photos from my desktop and used a recovery tool program to scrub my hard drive for recently deleted images. The program worked very good as I was able to recover my deleted family pictures but I had to go through hundreds of images to find them. In those hundreds of images I went through, I found screenshots of my Firefox activity from banking sessions, to amazon shopping, to google searches. I was stunned. They were only screenshots of Firefox browsing sessions. Hundreds. All taken without my knowledge. I clear my data often on Firefox. Cookies, cache, history, etc. I clear everything. Does anyone know why this is happening and how to stop it? It's definitely a security issue, a lot of the screenshots even showed "sign on" screenshots of banking sessions and amazon user names, email log-ins, etc. I don't know where the screenshots are stored, like I said I used a deleted image recovery program and it doesn't tell you, it just finds files. I scoured my computer looking for jpgs, pngs, etc and couldn't find anything on my own.

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hello Butthump, what you are seeing might be the thumbnails created for the default new tab page.

to disable the creation of cached thumbnails generally, enter about:config into the firefox location bar (confirm the info message in case it shows up). right-click somewhere in the page and create a new boolean preference named browser.pagethumbnails.capturing_disabled set to true.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Preferences/Preference_reference/browser.pagethumbnails.capturing_disabled

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hello Butthump, what you are seeing might be the thumbnails created for the default new tab page.

to disable the creation of cached thumbnails generally, enter about:config into the firefox location bar (confirm the info message in case it shows up). right-click somewhere in the page and create a new boolean preference named browser.pagethumbnails.capturing_disabled set to true.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Preferences/Preference_reference/browser.pagethumbnails.capturing_disabled

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Thanks for replying so quick. I took your advice and disabled the thumbnail capturing. Do you happen to know where the thumbnails are stored on my mac? There has to be a thumbnail cache folder or something right? I would like to delete anything it has saved. Thanks.

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i don't have a mac myself, so i cannot verify it, but according to some sources on the web, they'd likely be at ~/Users/<USERNAME>/Library/Caches/Firefox/Profiles/<XXX.default>/thumbnails

the Library folder might be hidden by default
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/mavericks-easily-make-user-library-folder-visible
http://osxdaily.com/2011/07/22/access-user-library-folder-in-os-x-lion/

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You can find the location of the disk cache on the about:cache page (open this page via the location bar).
If you go back one level (i.e. remove the trailing Cache) then you should see the thumbnails folder listed.