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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.

8 of 112 comments (clear)

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

    Comment.

  2. 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?

  3. 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 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.

    2. 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: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.
  5. 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: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...