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Mozilla Launches Facebook Container Add-on To Isolate Your Web Browsing Activity From Facebook (venturebeat.com)
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.
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.
Comment.
When a website can track you, it's no longer a website. I call that malware. Why did we let this happen again?
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.
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.