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Comment by inetsee | Hacker News Reader

I just added the "Facebook Container" extension to my Firefox browser. I am hoping it will prevent most of Facebook's tracking, but I do know that it probably won't block all the tracking.

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Won't ublock [1] solve that by blocking that kind of scripts from loading?

[1] https://www.ublock.org/

There are other ways that facebook can track you, ublock does counter a lot of it but there is a constant stream of innovations and work arounds by tracking companies to keep a hold on you. I think the financial motivation for them to keep tracking you outweighs the effort ublock can put into stopping that. The firefox container is a legitimately novel approach to stopping the problem though I'm certain it will be attacked as well... I think starting from a stance of distrust gives them a lot more power to combat tracking efforts.

Strange to disparage uBlock Origin while praising Facebook Container, because the latter is weaker than the former.

uBlock Origin with either "Fanboy's Third Party Social" or "Fanboy's Social Blocking List" selected will block all third-party connections to Facebook servers, period. Of course Facebook can still spy on you via other spy companies, but the "EasyPrivacy" list cuts that down a lot too.

On the other hand, Facebook Container still happily connect to Facebook servers from third-party websites, leaking your IP, useragent, the URL of the webpage you're viewing, headers containing fingerprinting information like fonts , etc. Facebook Container does one thing and one thing only: strip off the Facebook cookie. But this is almost worthless from an information theoretic perspective, because Facebook can trivially de-anonymize you through IP/timestamp/header correlation.

> Facebook Container still happily connect to Facebook servers from third-party websites

What? How do you open a non-Facebook website in the Facebook container? When you open external links on Facebook, from the Facebook container, they open in the normal container.

The like button on third party websites sends a request to Facebook servers.

FYI, uBlock (without 'Origin') is not the recommended one. The original is maintained by gorhill and it's available from https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

I highly recommend Ghostery.

I recommend Privacy Badger, sponsored by the EFF, which is supposed to block trackers. I prefer it over Ghostery, which is backed by some company.

uBlock Origin is great for blocking Ads though. If you really need to block scripts, there's NoScript.

I recommend using at least the adblocker and the tracker blocker, even if only to reduce memory usage of the browser and take back a couple of CPU cycles from your computer stolen by pesky ads.

Not to mention that ghostery used to sell your data to advertisers. I think they stopped, but how ironic can it get!?

uBlock Origin + Privacy Badger are my combo of choice. They play nicely together, and are easy enough to deal with that my non-web-savvy father-in-law surfs comfortably with them. Privacy Badger's most glaring weakness is that it takes a new install of the plugin awhile to learn that Facebook, fbcdn, etc are up to no good, but once it catches on, it’s great.

I've always wondered how well Privacy Badger works if you also have third-party cookies disabled - is there any benefit in that case?

Privacy Badger is also based on AdBlock Plus's code, which is a weakness in itself. The entire reason uBlock Origin exists is because of inefficiencies with ABP that the author thought could be avoided.

I just check the privacy list options in uBlock Origin.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-vs.-ABP:-effic...

yup likewise.

I noticed their 'opt out for interest based ads' was through a cookie set by some consortium of creeps companies. at the time I remember thinking its like 'if I dont want you to track and follow me all over the internet then I need to allow you to track me and follow me all over the place so you know who I am.. Riiight'. plus that setting resets if you delete the cookie. so I dont know how will that work with the container. perhaps somebody who knows more can enlighten me.

honestly given that FB is after my healthcare data, my patience has worn quite thin with them. IMHO the creep factor and unintended consequences are way to many.

> given that FB is after my healthcare data

What? Can you provide a link to that? I hadn't heard this before, and find that really disturbing. I'd like to learn more.

they might be referring to this: https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/5/17203262/facebook-medical-...

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