It’s sort of like isolating cookies, between Facebook and non-faceboak loads.
Except its not just for cookies bit all kinds of implicit signals being used for tracking.
It’s sort of like isolating cookies, between Facebook and non-faceboak loads.
Except its not just for cookies bit all kinds of implicit signals being used for tracking.
I use Facebook in a single-site browser with a separate cookie jar, and I block it in my actual general purpose browser. This is sufficient for my purposes, but I like the containerization approach in general – I’d love it if I could tell my browser to do this for every site I visit.
But you can! Sort of! See https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/first-party-isolation/
Oh, this is neat. I’ve been using uBlock Origin in medium mode to keep various identity providers from tracking me across the web, which I think (mostly?) accomplishes that goal. But it takes sufficient work to unbreak websites that it’s not something I could recommend to non-techie friends/relatives. Seems that First Party Isolation might be though?
I will definitely try this out.
This is cool, AFAICT it’s basically their existing container-tab feature (which requires no extension), and the only difference is that it automates the creation of a container for Facebook, so that whenever you load Facebook it loads in the Facebook container tab.
This is great, but even better is this amazing extension called “not using Facebook”.
Its a real shame some of us have close friends and family who don’t care about digital privacy and use Facebook to communicate. The container is a great idea (and good on Mozilla for putting it together!) So not all of us can use the ‘not using Facebook’ extension. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Disclaimer: I also don’t care enough.
I have plenty of friends and family who use that website and they’re all happy to communicate using other methods like text message, email, even Signal.
I’m sure you do have plenty of friends that don’t mind communicating that way. I do not. I do use signal as my primary SMS driver however and am a big fan. My point is that dropping FB as a communications tool is a case by case study. I don’t think I can’t convince moms to use something else to video call me while she’s already on FB talking to her quilting friends.
Have you tried? (Quitting FB completely, at least for a month?) If not, how can you be so sure?
I’ve quit facebook more than 5 years ago, and I’ve tried ever since to convince others to do so as well, but to paint it as anything simple is ignorance of how deep its roots now run in a lot of communities. Even I still rely on facebook indirectly to find out about events through friends who are still on facebook. I’ve also lost contact with a lot of old friends, and while I see that as no problem, since the friendships that mattered to me still persisted, I can’t ask others to accept the same. With no clear alternative in sight, asking people to quit facebook is akin to asking people decades ago to get rid of their landlines. You’ll need more than “facebook is watching you”.
This is very true. If Facebook was just a creepy surveillance system designed to sell you ads, no-one would use it. For many people, Facebook provides value - connections with friends and family, the ability to communicate over vast distances, a place where you can, in some ways, curate your own personality. The problem is that FB offers this seemingly for free, while hiding the actual cost from its users.
I’ve done so and, tbh, I completely isolated myself from many friends. Not that I don’t speak to/see them, but that I miss lots of spontaneous opportunities. Like a picture with a drink saying “come grab a drink if you’re nearby”, that I don’t see anymore, or just basic events that I don’t receive anymore and is a pain to forward/update to people that are not on FB…
umbrellas will never keep you as dry as not going outside, yet they remain popular
I find “outside” to be a genuinely wonderful and interesting place for which I can think of no substitute.
that’s pretty much how i feel about my community of friends on facebook. (your other comment about friends keeping in touch via other platforms misses the third place aspect of facebook)
By all means, make Facebook your third place of choice for you and your friends. ^_^
and thanks to mozilla for providing one of those means!
Really? I find it rather overrated. The rank grind’s mostly terrible, most of the map is just empty water and the graphics leave a lot to be desired (I think charging for the HD contact lens upgrade in-game while immersive is a very EA-style move).
Also the big event storylines are a bit far-fetched. I mean, putting a bright orange idiot in as president? Come on.
I installed this and I’m not even sure it works because it’s possibly mimicking my container-tab-Facebook setup so closely. Might need a new profile to examine the exact difference…
This is perfect. I don’t use facebook at all but it’s great mozilla is building tools to let people use it in a safer way.
I think it is very good that they are working on coming up to new solutions to avoid digital surveillance. But I remember reading that they already get the identity of logged out users using fingerprints like battery life. Using the techniques like the aforementioned one they could tie the two ‘browsing contexts’ together.
Still, glad that they are fighting the good fight.
This is very true. I would be interested to see how Panopticlick performs in a Firefox container tab. There’s a reason Tor Browser patches Firefox so heavily (but to be fair, that goodness is coming upstream!)
Without blocking everything Facebook off-tab, this will still leave ways for FB to track you.