Mozilla’s New Firefox Extension Will Isolate Facebook Tracking

There’s a broader conversation taking place now about how companies like Facebook use and protect the treasure trove of data that they have on their users. Amid the #deletefacebook campaign that’s gathering steam, Mozilla has offered a new option that provides more control over Facebook tracking. It has launched a new Firefox extension called “Facebook Container” which will essentially isolate Facebook tracking from the rest of your online activity.

With the extension installed in Firefox, you can continue to use Facebook normally and the social network will work like it always have. It’s not an ad blocker so you’ll continue to see ads as well. However, Facebook Container will make it much difficult for Facebook to use information about your web activity off of the social network to target ads to you.

Facebook has developed sophisticated ad tracking technology which enables the company to see what you’ve been searching for online and then target ads for those products on Facebook. Its network of trackers exists on a wide variety of websites that it invisibly tracks users to collect data that’s then used to target ads.

The Firefox Container extension doesn’t take away from the Facebook experience in any way so you can continue to use it as you always have. It’s available as a free download for Firefox and as you can probably imagine, the extension isn’t available for any other web browser.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Web
Tags: Facebook, Firefox, Mozilla