Facebook Container

Facebook, one of the most popular social networks in the world, has repeatedly been involved in scandals regarding the collection of user data. If you find Facebook to be a useful service and don't want to stop using it, but also care for how much of your personal information is shared with the company, then a first step into securing your account is to use the Facebook Container addon on Firefox.

The purpose of Facebook Container is to provide you with improved control over the data that is sent over to the social network. In other words, it can limit the capabilities of Facebook to track your online activity on other websites. To do so, the addon practically isolates Facebook into a so-called "container," blocking its attempts to track you using third-party cookies.

Once Facebook Container is installed on Mozilla Firefox, you are logged out of your Facebook account, and the collected Facebook cookies are erased permanently. Loading Facebook again opens it in the new container, a tab marked with a blue line. From this point on, you can use the social network exactly as you did before, except that some functions might not work as you would expect them to.

Any non-Facebook link that you open in the same tab loads outside the container. On the other hand, choosing to share on Facebook from another website loads the Facebook website within the container. However, in this latter case, Facebook still gets details about the website that Firefox redirected from.

While the container is active, you are only logged in to Facebook within it, which means that "Like" buttons and Facebook comments in other tabs should not work. This approach blocks Facebook's attempts to link your account to your online activity. Following the same principle, logging in with the Facebook credentials on third-party websites might fail.

Facebook Container aims to limit the tracking capabilities of the social network, but note that there are other ad networks that will still be able to associate your Facebook account with your browsing habits. To further limit tracking endeavors, you can tamper with the default security settings of your Facebook account, and make sure the configuration settings of your web browser are set to protect your privacy.