hi, the connection to the google safebrowsing service sets a cookie but this is a passive piece of information and can't be used to track your browsing history. firefox also keeps it sandboxed and it doesn't get exposed during normal browsing activity on google domains.

in regards to your concern about "linking web activities to my IP address" - this is just part of the fundamentals of how the internet works. if you access something online, the server at the other end needs to know your ip address in order to send back any information to the right recipient...

That article is 1, very old (Firefox uses the 4th version of the Safe browsing API, that article is talking about v2).

https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/v4/

You can read this actual article about Safe Browsing in Firefox (https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/how-safe-browsing-works-in-firefox/). It's a bit dated, but does talk about how we protect privacy.

You can also read https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-does-phishing-and-malware-protection-work

FYI, the NSA doesn't use cookies to track you.