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Comment by exhilaration | Hacker News Reader

I have a question regarding this: "tracking everything you read on the internet"

I recently disabled third party cookies in Chrome and it's had no negative effect. Can someone tell me if this will block the Facebook code that's embedded in nearly every web page from reading my Facebook cookie and identifying me?

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A better and more holistic approach, IMO, which I use with Firefox (sorry, I don't use Chrome as often, and in my limited experience I haven't seen it having as many extensions), is to use FB with these browser extensions:

1. Privacy Badger (from EFF)

2. Clean Links (removes all the redirect links from several sites, including FB)

3. Self-Destructing Cookies (destroys cookies when tabs of a particular site are all closed; default time to delete after tab closure is 10 seconds, which I reduce on my installations)

4. uBlock Origin (blocks ads and trackers)

5. BetterPrivacy (deletes "super-cookies" from things like Flash)

I don't use Ghostery because its business model depends on advertisers. Same goes for Adblock and its cousins too.

Even with all of the above, FB may still be able to track because there are many ways apart from cookies to do it. There could be browser fingerprinting [1] using various other indicators.

[1]: https://panopticlick.eff.org/

No it only blocks cookies, but not the javascript code from facebook that gets loaded on the pages you visit. If you want to get rid of that, install a browser plugin like Ghostery (0).

0: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ghostery/mlomiejdf...

I also use a hosts file block to avoid tracking: https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

Or privacy badger, from the EFF (0)

0:https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

But wait... can they still identify you that way? I'm not on facebook, so maybe it's moot in my case. But are you saying that blocking third-party cookies is not enough to keep facebook from tracking your other browsing activity?

Every time you go to a website with the Facebook like button, they see your IP address and the website you're on. Go to enough websites from that IP address and they can get a good idea of what you like. In addition, it is very easy to get your real address from your IP address, or at least your general area. Combining these gives them a good idea of who you are.

Technically Facebook can by using the requests your browser sends for their ubiquitous sharing widgets on many websites. Your browser very probably has a unique fingerprint¹, so you might want to block those widgets as well (Privacy Badger does this).

Because Facebook's profits come from advertising and that understanding our browser habits is a requirement for their core business, it is not too far-fetched to believe that they track non-users as well.

1: https://panopticlick.eff.org/

I use the Disconnect-plugin[0] for these concerns. It disables loading (and executing) javascript, cookies and graphics from the most notorious tracking sites.

[0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disconnect/jeoacaf...

All the other things everyone else here said plus: Quick Javascript Switcher (Chrome) or equivalent in FF. They can't track you if they can't run their Javascript (and you don't request pages from them or their friends). You can turn it on for domains you need it on. I truly wish this was the default state of browsers and that it had a counter of lines of JS blocked. I'd probably be in the billions easily by now.

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