How to Stop Facebook Tracking You Online

What does nobody like at the moment? Facebook! Ol’ Marky Zuckerberg has gone from being the toast of the town to whatever the opposite of toast is. Eggs. He’s the eggs of the town, refusing to talk to MPs, addressing as little of the Cambridge Analytica controversy as he can, and generally not doing much to stop the tide of people closing down their Facebook accounts.

If you don’t want to shut your account but do want to limit what they know about you, the world’s third-most-used browser could be the answer.

Mozilla, makers of the browser Firefox, have created an extension that stops the social network from being able to monitor your online activity.

Called Facebook Container, it does what it says on the tin, ‘containing’ activity related to Zuck Club. It keeps Facebook within a specially demarcated blue tab, and if you click on a link from within it, it opens in a separate tab, telling Zuckerberg nothing.

Among other things, this will prevent that thing where you look at a product and then, later, see an advert for exactly the product you were looking for on Facebook.

It also means Facebook won’t know what you’re up to when you go on sites that use Facebook for comments.

Firefox is, by a country mile, the browser of choice if you have a lot of privacy concerns.

Data protection is one of their top priorities, and they pay anyone who finds holes in their system. Their corporate manifesto states that “individuals’ security and privacy on the Internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional”.

Source: Shortlist