Mozilla launches 'Facebook Container' extension for its Firefox browser that isolates the Facebook identity of users from rest of their web activity

[Arika]

Firefox is fast becoming my favorite browser, and stuff like this makes me even more happy to use it....though i dont use facebook anyway

Quote

This extension helps you control more of your web activity from Facebook by isolating your identity into a separate container. This makes it harder for Facebook to track your activity on other websites via third-party cookies.

Rather than stop using a service you find valuable and miss out on those adorable photos of your nephew, we think you should have tools to limit what data others can collect about you. That includes us: Mozilla does not collect data from your use of the Facebook Container extension. We only know the number of times the extension is installed or removed.

Given everything that has happened over the last few weeks this is going to become a handy extension for anyone that uses facebook. Hopefully the concept of the tech can be applied to all tabs in the future, not just facebook.

 

Quote

Should you click on any Facebook Share buttons on other browser tabs it will load them within the Facebook container. You should know that when you’re using these buttons information will be sent to Facebook about the website that you shared from.

Seems they are somehow able to contain anything related to facebook regardless of how you got there. When i first started reading i thought there was going to be some stipulation that if you accessed it from another site instead of going directly to the URL that it would not work. however this doest appear to be the case.

 

the one "catch" seems to be

Quote

If you use your Facebook credentials to create an account or log in using your Facebook credentials, it may not work properly and you may not be able to login. Also, because you’re logged into Facebook in the container tab, embedded Facebook comments and Like buttons in tabs outside the Facebook container tab will not work. This prevents Facebook from associating information about your activity on websites outside of Facebook to your Facebook identity. So it may look different than what you are used to seeing.

But really shouldn't be a big issue since this is likely how they got a lot of the information anyway. I would suggest that no one used the "login via facebook" to create an account or to leave a comment on a third party site as it will not be contained by this extension

 

so while it wont prevent Facebook from having your information that you give them, it will prevent them from tracking your web browsing which they have been accused of in the past, even if no Facebook tab is open.

 

According to the author of the extension; "The feature uses a unique architecture of Firefox called OriginAttributes" and therefore not able to be migrated to other browsers in it's current form, but there might be similar things popping up for other browsers that do similar "containment"

 

I quite like the concept of it and will be looking forward to further iterations of it and seeing what other stuff it can be applied to.

 

https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/facebook-container-extension/

[cheTesta]

Actually didn't know about these containers.
Will definetly check them asap.

 

Last clue to me: FFq broke my bookmarking managment, Xmarks, between multiple browsers. Damn the devs of the app not keeping up w/ browser

[paddy-stone]

Just FYI, I have been using am extension for many months now called "disconnect"  - it pretty much is like a blocker for those troublesome trackers, it helps against google,facebook and twitter trackers... and you can disable on certain sites if you need to just like an ad blocker.

Hope that helps someone

 

[suicidalfranco]

should use it even if you don't have facebook, it's known that facebook even follow people who aren't signed to it

https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/27/11795248/facebook-ad-network-non-users-cookies-plug-ins

[Jinchu]

31 minutes ago, paddy-stone said:

Just FYI, I have been using am extension for many months now called "disconnect"  - -

Hope that helps someone

Looks awesome. I'll give it a try. Thanks for sharing.

[paddy-stone]

Just now, Jinchu said:

Looks awesome. I'll give it a try. Thanks for sharing.

No problem, happy to help someone... hope you like it as much as I do.

[Jinchu]

20 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

should use it even if you don't have facebook, it's known that facebook even follow people who aren't signed to it

https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/27/11795248/facebook-ad-network-non-users-cookies-plug-ins

Also Twitter and Google etc. I mean, do people really thing that for example Google is any better?

[Tenchips]

32 minutes ago, paddy-stone said:

Just FYI, I have been using am extension for many months now called "disconnect"  - it pretty much is like a blocker for those troublesome trackers, it helps against google,facebook and twitter trackers... and you can disable on certain sites if you need to just like an ad blocker.

Hope that helps someone

In addition to this, I already use Privacy badger and Https everywhere, as recommended by the Electronic foundation frontier

( see also https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/one-answer-facebook-problem-block-its-tracking-technologies)

 

Cheers guys

[paddy-stone]

8 minutes ago, Tenchips said:

In addition to this, I already use Privacy badger and Https everywhere, as recommended by the Electronic foundation frontier

( see also https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/one-answer-facebook-problem-block-its-tracking-technologies)

 

Cheers guys

I used to use https everywhere, but TBH most of the sites I visited already used https anyway, I think the last one was this site, which finally went over to https late last tear IIRC. It is handy to have though, you just have to bear in mind that some sites will NOT work with it, and others you need to manually do something, can't remember right now, but as long as you are vigilant you should be OK. I actually use a VPN, so a lot of the tracking is mitigated anyway in my case.

Good to know about privacy badger though, thanks for that, added it to my list

[edit] I actually realised that I used to use privacy badger waaay back, it's one of those extensions that I managed to forget when I re-installed my PC back then. Will give it another go.

[ScratchCat]

You can use these containers for things other than Facebook, useful for using multiple accounts on the same website and segregating online sessions.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/

 

26 minutes ago, paddy-stone said:

Good to know about privacy badger though, thanks for that, added it to my list

[edit] I actually realised that I used to use privacy badger waaay back, it's one of those extensions that I managed to forget when I re-installed my PC back then. Will give it another go.

Privacy Badger's ability to block cookies only rather than block the service is quite beneficial for accessing websites which you want to support via ad revenue or block users with ad blockers.

 

• Decentraleyes is also quite useful - The addon reroutes common CDN requests to your local machine to prevent tracking via CDNs and lowering page loading time.
• Canvas Defender/Blocker - Obscure your canvas fingerprint (each machine generates a different hash depending on the system configuration and this can be used to identify an individual).
• User Agent modifiers - Hide / change your user agent.

You can use panopticlick to check how detailed your browser fingerprint is. Given the amount of tracking everyone is doing now it may be worth switching to Tor without the proxy.
 

[Tenchips]

3 hours ago, paddy-stone said:

It is handy to have though, you just have to bear in mind that some sites will NOT work with it, and others you need to manually do something, can't remember right now, but as long as you are vigilant you should be OK. I actually use a VPN, so a lot of the tracking is mitigated anyway in my case.

Happy to remind you this!

And for me, even though I know most websites have https, there are still a lot of them (especially company websites) that don't, and it costs me nothing to have it activated all the time

 

On my personal computer and phone I always use a VPN, but I cannot on my work computer
 

And yes privacy badger has quite a good reputation in terms of blocking trackers! But some websites might fail to display information and images if it's activated: FYI you can find which tracker is causing the issue by allowing a tracker, one tracker at a time

 

2 hours ago, ScratchCat said:

• Decentraleyes is also quite useful - The addon reroutes common CDN requests to your local machine to prevent tracking via CDNs and lowering page loading time.
• Canvas Defender/Blocker - Obscure your canvas fingerprint (each machine generates a different hash depending on the system configuration and this can be used to identify an individual).
• User Agent modifiers - Hide / change your user agent.

Thanks for this @ScratchCat, I just added all of these to my browser heh

 

Anyway, thanks @Sierra Fox for the info

 

EDIT: added screenshot

Edited March 28, 2018 by Tenchips
EDIT: added screenshot

[Zodiark1593]

3 hours ago, Jinchu said:

Also Twitter and Google etc. I mean, do people really thing that for example Google is any better?

Taking a glance at the most recent ad shows me a deal for a vacation trip to Israel. These giant ad agencies suck at their jobs, quite frankly.

[yian88]

What annoys me is that Windows 10 collects 10 times more data than facebook(same for google) and no one bats an eye anymore. Yet people care about facebook's data collection, what the hell people why are you so ignorant? either go with privacy all the way, dump win10, dump google android(no alternative) and facebook/social media crap or live with your data stolen from you daily and shared with whoever they want.

[Jinchu]

1 hour ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Taking a glance at the most recent ad shows me a deal for a vacation trip to Israel. These giant ad agencies suck at their jobs, quite frankly.

I've wondered the same thing. The adds are either irrelevant or better yet they sell the exact product I resently bought. One would imagine that it'd be easy to do better with that kind of knowledge.

[Jinchu]

2 hours ago, yian88 said:

What annoys me is that Windows 10 collects 10 times more data than facebook(same for google) and no one bats an eye anymore. Yet people care about facebook's data collection, what the hell people why are you so ignorant? either go with privacy all the way, dump win10, dump google android(no alternative) and facebook/social media crap or live with your data stolen from you daily and shared with whoever they want.

AFAIK Microsoft is not selling the data they gather. So in that sense it is different. But ermmm. Windows 10 data collection is BS and users should be able to disable it.

[Arika]

7 hours ago, yian88 said:

What annoys me is that Windows 10 collects 10 times more data than facebook(same for google) and no one bats an eye anymore. Yet people care about facebook's data collection, what the hell people why are you so ignorant? either go with privacy all the way, dump win10, dump google android(no alternative) and facebook/social media crap or live with your data stolen from you daily and shared with whoever they want.

I would say your bank has more sensitive information about you. So should I stop using a bank?

[Beskamir]

Why don't people just use noscript? Sure it breaks your browsing experience for a couple days but after that it's great.

[jagdtigger]

12 hours ago, Jinchu said:

AFAIK Microsoft is not selling the data they gather.

Not yet...

[TheKDub]

14 hours ago, yian88 said:

What annoys me is that Windows 10 collects 10 times more data than facebook(same for google) and no one bats an eye anymore. Yet people care about facebook's data collection, what the hell people why are you so ignorant? either go with privacy all the way, dump win10, dump google android(no alternative) and facebook/social media crap or live with your data stolen from you daily and shared with whoever they want.

iOS is (hardly) an alternative for Android. For a Google alternative, perhaps http://DuckDuckGo.com?

There supposedly are some Linux distros that can be installed on certain phones too, so that could be an option. (App support would be abysmal though)

[Guest]

Wierd thing happened related to FaceBook - maybe someone can shed some light on this. I kept getting these bots as FB grew, didn't think much of it because you get bots like every other service. Then, I change my name (cause someone stalking me irl wierd af ik) and no more bots at all. So pro tip if you are getting a lot of bots maybe change your name. 

[vorticalbox]

On 27/03/2018 at 11:38 PM, cheTesta said:

Actually didn't know about these containers.
Will definetly check them asap.

 

Last clue to me: FFq broke my bookmarking managment, Xmarks, between multiple browsers. Damn the devs of the app not keeping up w/ browser

If you're worried about blocking trackers and the like you should look into brave. Based on chrome and has it all built in along with https anywhere (where available) will switch you https.