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Comment by JohnTHaller | Hacker News Reader

You can minimize your Facebook footprint by removing unnecessary data from Facebook and your profile, never using Login with Facebook on websites (and switching any you do to a proper login and strong password), using an ad blocker to block Facebook like/share/login/comment on third party sites, and only using Firefox in a contained way. I use it in Firefox with the Facebook container ( https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/facebookcontainer/ ) which keeps your Firefox browsing separate and doesn't bleed the data to other sites.

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Yep . . . I rarely post, have never used 'Login with FB', I use a unique email address for FB, don't have the app on my phone (and when I did, I never allowed it to access contacts), and IE/Edge has always been my "FB browser" . . . when I downloaded the data they had on me recently, it was nothing I was uncomfortable with at all . . . the new FB container on Firefox is really interesting, but I haven't started using it.

> using an ad blocker to block Facebook like/share/login/comment on third party sites,

Would blocking domains used for Facebook embedded content using the hosts file also work for this purpose?

I would think this would have the advantage of applying to all browsers on ones machine, and not requiring the code to remove the references from the pages on each page load (instead doing stuff when resolving the domains).

Is there a reason this wouldn't work as well?

You can do it this way. Though as I have repeatedly said, blocking Facebook is more of a symbolic gesture that you dislike tracking, rather than actually disabling tracking. There are many other companies that are tracking you, who collectively have far more data about you than Facebook does, and because they are lower profile, they can do things with that data that actually are nefarious (unlike in the case of Facebook). If you don't want to be tracked, give your smartphone to a homeless person and cancel your Internet service.

Still, if you want to bother with the drop-in-the-ocean strategy and block Facebook domains with your hosts file, see:

https://gist.github.com/thomasbilk/1506210/2d20f47bbcca75b2f...

I blocked it at the dns and firewall of my network.

minimize your Facebook footprint by removing unnecessary data from Facebook and your profile

You cannot remove it really, only hide it. Facebook itself still has your data.

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