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Comment by jakecopp | Hacker News Reader

I find the danger with ad blockers is they hide the true extent of the tracking from me, because I never see the results.

I've now sandboxed Facebook (and others) in container tabs in Firefox so no cookies go in or out, along with uBlock Origin to whitelist JS per site.

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> I find the danger with ad blockers is they hide the true extent of the tracking from me, because I never see the results.

Seeing some relevant ads on the web is just scratching the surface isn't it? Isn't the true extent – and far more worrying – what we can't immediately see, or know it's because of tracking?

http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/the-surveillance-parad...

I only discovered her writing last night, but Shoshana Zuboff appears to think it is mass surveillance, that big data has bought in new classes of overloads, technology is an attack on democracy and some uses of it break the fundamentals of trust and contracts etc.

Can you elaborate how you sandboxed tabs in Firefox? I use incognito when using Google or sites that use Facebook commenting on order to lower the tracking ability, but sandboxing sounds better.

Container tabs: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers

I make one "Container" per account, and then visit the page in question and tick "Always open in $CONTAINER_NAME. Then when you sign into Facebook, any other domain won't get the cookie.

Then get Cookie AutoDelete, tick "Enable Support for Firefox's Container Tabs", and whitelist the cookies you need to sign into those sites.

Combined with uBlock Origin it's the best setup I've found so far, though Firefox Quantum destroys my MacBook's battery.

I used to have Safari and Safari Technology Preview to keep good battery life, with only one browser signed into Google, FB and others but I still noticed some searches into the non-signed in browser leaking to FB - I have a feeling the two browsers share some state.

If anybody knows an improvement for Firefox's battery usage on macOS I'd love to hear!

Good ad blockers stop a lot of the tracking as well, though - which is the main reason I use ad blocking.

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