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Adblock Plus gives Facebook users a way to block its extended tracking efforts

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Re: Adblock Plus gives Facebook users a way to block its extended tracking efforts

#5

Post by dspillett »

To minimise the tracking without plugins: always login to facebook and anything that has your personal details in a "private" session or a browser you don't normally use with flash turned off (or not installed in the first place). Not perfect, but good enough for me.

Of course everyone in my other browser sessions is tracking me between sites, but it isn't linked to my social profiles and such.

TBH I don't really care about the tracking of me. The thing that I find annoys is the combined tracking of me and my contacts: I don't like the idea of them trying to track other people through me.

Re: Adblock Plus gives Facebook users a way to block its extended tracking efforts

#7

Post by fchollet »

dspillett wrote: post #5

To minimise the tracking without plugins: always login to facebook and anything that has your personal details in a "private" session or a browser you don't normally use with flash turned off (or not installed in the first place). Not perfect, but good enough for me. Of course everyone in my other browser sessions is tracking me between sites, but it isn't linked to my social profiles and such. TBH I don't really car…

This is a very shallow way of "escaping"; your browsing activity is definitely being linked to your social media identities via your IP(s) and browser fingerprint.

For instance Google does maintain such non-cookie-based user identities. I'd be highly surprised if Facebook didn't as well; your data is just too valuable to pass on such easy fixes.

Re: Adblock Plus gives Facebook users a way to block its extended tracking efforts

#8

Post by zo1 »

teamhappy wrote: post #6

I take it Ghostery takes care of it as well. Does anybody know?

I'd also be curious to know this. Ghostery was quite an eye-opener when I first tried it. Everytime you go to a site, it lists all the items that it blocked on that page.

Re: Adblock Plus gives Facebook users a way to block its extended tracking efforts

#9

Post by fchollet »

tech-no-logical wrote: post #4

and to all site owners moaning about people using adblock : this is why we can't have nice things. as long as policies like this exist, I'll block anything remotely able to track me.

It is very difficult to get somebody to understand something when they have some amount of income depending on not understanding it. Of course site owners are always going to stand behind the ad-supported model of the web, even though it creates all the wrong incentives for content creators and massively degrades the user experience. And generally, degrades the very value proposition of the web.

(disclaimer: I run a 5k DAU social network with no ads).

Re: Adblock Plus gives Facebook users a way to block its extended tracking efforts

#10

Post by Bassetts »

I recently switched from Adblock Plus to HTTP Switchboard[0]. I find it gives you much better control over what gets blocked, and it properly blocks what you have told it to, not just hide them.

I have it set up in quite a restrictive way so by default a site level scope is created and only image/css is allowed. It means I have to take anywhere from a couple of seconds to a few minutes to enable things a site needs to function, but I much prefer that to having tracking cookies, social media buttons, obnoxious adverts etc.

Also the Adblock site claims you can also block a few annoyances specific to Facebook[0]. Is that actually the case? I thought Adblock just used element hiding.

[0] https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/ [1] https://facebook.adblockplus.me/en/

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