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Mozilla Launches Facebook Container Add-on To Isolate Your Web Browsing Activity From Facebook (venturebeat.com)

Posted by msmash on from the let-the-engineering-war-begin dept.

Paul Sawers, writing for VentureBeat: On Tuesday, Mozilla announced a new tool it said will help keep Facebook from tracking your browsing across the web. The Facebook Container add-on for Firefox promises to make it "much harder" for Facebook to track you when you're not on its site. Mozilla has been working on the technology for several years already, accelerating its development in response to what it called a "growing demand for tools that help manage privacy and security," according to a statement issued by Mozilla today.

Most people are probably aware that data they directly give to Facebook -- such as "liking" a Page or updating their relationship status -- may be sold to advertisers. But fewer people know that Facebook can also track their activities on other websites that have integrated with aspects of Facebook's tracking technology, such as the pervasive "Like" button. And it's in this scenario that Mozilla is now hoping to play the good guy.

20 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. Great! Now add a Google container and we're set by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Comment.

    1. Re:Great! Now add a Google container and we're set by VeryFluffyBunny · · Score: 2

      What's the biggest privacy abusing data collector of them all? -- It's not Facebook or Google or Microsoft, etc.. It's your ISP. The only way you can stop them is to use a VPN but in the past they've even found ways to "tag" your encrypted packets so that they can identify them as you wherever you go and then sell that information to 3rd parties.

      --
      Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
  2. still snooping my dns though? by nimbius · · Score: 2, Interesting

    But you still sniff my DNS traffic in the nightly releases right? Christ, whos running mozilla these days... https://www.theregister.co.uk/...

    --
    Good people go to bed earlier.
  3. Web is broken. by LoRdTAW · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When a website can track you, it's no longer a website. I call that malware. Why did we let this happen again?

    1. Re:Web is broken. by Opportunist · · Score: 2

      I don't know for sure, but I'm kinda certain it has something to do with getting something for free or videos of cute kittens.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    2. Re:Web is broken. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I completely disagree. It's running on their computer, serving their interests. That's the essence of not-malware.

      If your browser, though, is serving them, then it is malware.

  4. OR... by ceoyoyo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Instead of picking on Facebook specifically, you could have a setting that refuses to load any off-site data, unless it's on a whitelist. Then make it the default. Problem solved.

    1. Re:OR... by rtkluttz · · Score: 3, Interesting

      And anonymise the browser by just having it say yes I have it to every plugin, font, etc. and then just report LOCAL errors to the owner that content may not work because a plugin was requested that isn't actually installed. Also remove any and all functionality that allows outbound data to be sent without a user interaction... i.e. disable mouse location sensing, disable live fields that send data in real time such as google instant. Disable search in the address bar and any number of other things that reduce security and privacy of the user.

      --
      Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
    2. Re:OR... by svanheulen · · Score: 4, Interesting

      That's what uMatrix does: https://github.com/gorhill/uMa... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... It would be impossible to have that on by default for normal users though. Too many sites are broken by not allowing 3rd party requests, and the average user would just switch to Chrome rather then deal with making whitelists.

    3. Re:OR... by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Informative

      That's what Privacy Badger and uBlock are for.

      I read TFA and the Mozilla blog post and l still don't know exactly what their add-on does. It's not clear how it contains anything, or why I'd use it over Privacy Badger.

      Privacy Badger is great because it doesn't use whitelists. It looks for sites following you around the web, tracking you on multiple other sites, and blocks them. It generally doesn't break anything so I'm happy to install it on friend's and family member's computers.

      uBlock Origin is pretty great too, but for other people's computers I tend to only enable the basic ad-blocking to avoid breakage.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    4. Re:OR... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Google has carefully preempted any attempts to limit third party sources in web pages. By practically mandating (lest you be ranked lower in Google Search Engine results pages) that sites offload all sorts of things to separate domains ("to minimize overhead for unnecessary cookie transmissions") and even third parties ("to leverage caching of script libraries which are constant across web sites"), Google has made sure that sites break if you prevent them from loading third party resources. Now you're supposed to implement lazy loading (again, to "speed up pages", so that they will be ranked higher), which means sites won't show images unless you enable Javascript. Until web authors realize that Google is not their friend, the web is fucked.

    5. Re:OR... by ceoyoyo · · Score: 2

      Websites would get fixed in a hurry if it was the default. Could be you'd need the three majors to all do it at the same time.

      Alternately, Firefox could provide a reasonable default whitelist and pop up a scary warning when a page makes a request from a third party. That seems to have worked out pretty well for https. If the default whitelist was well made people might not even notice. The ads would disappear, darn, and the tracking bugs and like buttons, but most of the content is either local or delivered by reputable CDN.

  5. What about Google?! by yuvcifjt · · Score: 2

    Forget one little domain like facebook which can easily be blocked, what about the biggest data collector and serial tracker Google which is almost impossible to block?!

    1. Re:What about Google?! by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I think it's time for a "tracking cookie mix and match" addon. Every time you start your browser, you get a new tracking cookie from a pool of participating people that originally belonged to someone else. After a couple minutes you return the cookie to the pool and get a new one from someone else, while yours goes to some other person.

      What this eventually does is invalidate and thus poison the cookie data. Unless Google finds a way to voluntarily eliminate these cookies from their data mining, their whole data pool is useless. Which is basically all we want. Either they have to throw the cookies away that they use to track us, or they have to throw all tracking cookies away.

      Either is fine by me.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  6. Re:This Facebook news is not new. by Opportunist · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's not only Facebook. But you should start somewhere. Al Capone also wasn't the only crook in Chicago, but it's sensible to start with the biggest criminal.

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  7. This is perfect; now do it for "any" site. by IGnatius+T+Foobar · · Score: 2

    This is perfect. Although I don't use FB at all (it's so toxic that I block all of their domains and networks at the firewall) ... there are other sites that I'd like to be able to run "in a sandbox". Yes, I can open a Private Browsing window (or Incognito in chrome's parlance) but it's definitely time to have browser sandboxes that can isolate sites from each other. The trackers have become too powerful and we all need to start resisting them.

    --
    Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
  8. I question the whole ideology... by VeryFluffyBunny · · Score: 2

    OK, Facebook sucks but then so do Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Oracle, etc.. We're supposed to believe that the internet is a revolutionary force for good and that it's making the world a better place. Yeah, right. Keep drinking the cool-aid https://youtu.be/4tLvzyb3_Uc?t...

    --
    Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
  9. Re:You have to draw the line somewhere. by schwit1 · · Score: 3, Informative

    That would be Obama in 2012. His team used FB similar to Trump's team but it was called a genius move.

    And FB was in the pocket of Hillary's team

  10. Re: Great! Now add a Google container and we're se by yuvcifjt · · Score: 2

    No, Windows 10 bypasses the "kernel level" hosts file.

    And mozilla may also plan to perhaps bypass the local dns resolver in favour of "Trusted Recursive Resolver".

    APK: if you can invent an app to block domains/ip's at the router level for virtually any router on the market, then that would be something special and worth all your advertising time in comments! ;)

  11. Re:You have to draw the line somewhere. by satcat · · Score: 4, Informative

    Obama's campaign app asked for the information directly, and prompted users to send campaign messages to particular friends. Cambridge Analytica's data was acquired from a personality quiz (in violation of facebook policies, but CA didn't delete the data when requested), and used to plant fear-mongering ads. The former is at least somewhat honest. http://www.politifact.com/trut...