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Facebook's Atlas: the Platform For Advertisers To Track Your Movements
An anonymous reader writes In its most direct challenge to Google yet, Facebook plans to sell ads targeted to its 1.3 billion users when they are elsewhere on the Web. The company is rolling out an updated version of Atlas that will direct ads to people on websites and mobile apps. From the article: "The company said Atlas has been rebuilt 'from the ground up' to cater for today's marketing needs, such as 'reaching people across devices and bridging the gap between online impressions and offline purchases.'"
In my experience very few of those trackers are actually required for the site to function.
If you're using something you can selectively disallow, you can usually get it to work no problem. If I can't, I leave.
So far, my best combination in Chrome is DoNotTrackMe, Scriptsafe, Ghostery, AdBlockPlus, HTTP SwitchBoard, and Disconnect.
HTTP Switchboard gives really good granularity and also does script and cookie blocking, plus several other things.
So far I've confirmed Safari has had the blocking of 3rd party cookies implemented incompetently, worked around, and never updated ... so that's the least trustworthy browser I've found.
Firefox has some good add-ons, can selectively block cookies NoScript, DoNotTrackMe, AdBlockPlus, Ghostery and Disconnect ... but I've not found anything with the granularity of HTTP Switchboard, so I suspect web-bugs can still slip by some of them.
I really wish Mozilla hadn't caved and decided not to implement strong blocking of crap ... unfortunately their desire for ad revenue trumped making a browser which could actually be made more private.
IE, well ... treat IE like the thing you use for work when all else fails. Because there's always another exploit around the corner.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.