Meanwhile, Facebook, the social media giant, came into the limelight for tracking the personal credentials of its users and also got heavily plagued with the Cambridge Analytica Scandal. It caused a lot of chaos all over the web. To save their data, many users are also permanently left Facebook by deleting their account. It might not be a reasonable step towards getting protected on a safer side.
Now, as the companies like Facebook, Google, etc. consistently target users by showing ads according to their preferences, using the internet nowadays is getting much of a tough thing. So, to overcome this unwanted tracking while using social media, Mozilla, the non-profit internet company renowned for its open-source web-browser, Firefox, has announced a new add-on named ‘Facebook Container’ a week back. According to them, this add-on will help users to get rid of Facebook’s tracking activities while surfing social media. They also mentioned that it’d also be a hard thing for Facebook to track user data whenever they aren’t active on their site.
However, it’ll be available from Firefox v57.0. Moreover, according to Mozilla, they have been working for a long time on this potential demanded technology for preventing & blocking the tracking of social cookies on any third-party sites and closely managing the privacy & security of the user. However, due to the recent wake of Cambridge Analytica Scandal, which has completely changed the scenario by boosting the demand of privacy & security over the internet, the company has taken this project of creating these tools to a next level by completely accelerating the development of the software.
Growing demand for tools that help manage privacy and security,”- mentioned in their statement. Apart from that what it does is that it separates the identity of the user out from the reach of Facebook, so the user could have a more control over its web activity, and facebook cant intercept these activities by any means. On the official blog, Mozilla says –
Our Multi-Account Containers extension has been a game changer for many users, letting them manage various parts of their online life without intermingling their accounts. To help Firefox users have more control of their data on Facebook, we’ve created the Facebook Container Extension.
The pages you visit on the web can say a lot about you. They can infer where you live, the hobbies you have, and your political persuasion. There’s enormous value in tying this data to your social profile, and Facebook has a network of trackers on various websites. This code tracks you invisibly and it is often impossible to determine when this data is being shared.
The working principle of ‘Facebook Container’ is quite simple. As the name suggests, it opens up in a blue colored separate well-encrypted tab referred to as the container, which is fully disconnected from the rest of the browser. This means if someone uses Facebook then every single activity will be confined under this tab and will not further re-directed to any other tab. So, in a nutshell, Facebook will no longer be able to track web activities apart from its site. And moreover, all the web history of that particular tab including the cookies & data will be deleted after every active session.
However, it worth making a note that commenting or liking any post embedded on any other website won’t work. Besides, the users will also face a lot of issues whenever they try to log in to any online services via Facebook.
Overall, it is an add-on which is specifically focused and concerned about surfing the web with full security and data privacy which blocks the cookies that Facebook gradually generates and also prevent users from getting tracked. However, there are a couple of such tools present in the Chrome browser which almost serve the same purpose. As Mozilla is open source, there is a strong chance that the add-on will soon be added to google chrome ecosystem and all other ones also.