Check the facebook conrainer app for firefox
this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2025
92 points (98.9% liked)
Asklemmy
44615 readers
985 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Pro tips, ty! I was hoping for something mobile friendly but this will definitely help!
Tell those local businesses that you really want to support and follow them, but that you boycott Meta and the reasons that you do.
Honestly there's so many reasons businesses should also avoid Meta, like the fact Meta is literally collecting and selling their most valuable business data about their customers to other competing businesses. Tell them for their own good that Meta is not their friend, it might help them at first to get exposure, but only long enough to get that data and sell it off to a bigger fish.
To add to it,
Not META, but there are videos of small business owners explaining how amazon used their data to set up its own thing as their direct rivals, then manipulated their ratings, virtually stealing their clients too.
Tell them that selling their data to thurd parties is one of the biggest revenue streams of META, that you are NOT ok exposing your own business to such risks and that as a serious business, they should be wary of giving data to data selling / leasing social networks as well.
Some friends had to restart their business because their only online presence was on Instagram and their account got banned. So all their sales dropped to almost 0 overnight
Yup. Now I also get that exposure and engagement are important to small businesses, but to that end they shouldn't lock themselves to one place either. Point out the benefits of more open solutions like Bluesky and Mastodon, and the benefits of setting up their own hosted site/blog that they can then broadcast on social media but slowly cut them out as a middle man by pushing customers to their site directly.
And most certainly businesses should never use the "algorithm" on social media to collect data or get "free" advertising such as those "like/repost to win" style posts. Those are not free advertising, those are doing free data collection work for Meta.
Heh. I explicitly DON'T and I feel it's those businesses and people's problem. There are other methods. Not everyone uses Facebook.
I refuse.
First of all, figure out your threat model. What data are you trying to keep secret from Facebook? What will happen to you if Facebook gets that data? What lengths are reasonable to prevent that outcome?
Then figure out how to consistently prevent that data from leaking.
I don't want Facebook knowing my address, name, age, and face - basically I don't want to be doxxed. I'm not willing to go through the effort of hiding my IP, so I'm willing to give up on that, but the others are easy enough to lie about.
The assumption that there is only one kind of threat model relevant to a person / business is a bad assumption.
If you have different threat models for different data, then you should enumerate them and work through each.
Facebook has ghost profiles of non Facebook users because of tracking embedded in βlikeβ buttons on websites. If you wanted to go full paranoid I would suggest using an extension to change your user agent. But it is probably worth identifying the specific threat vectors you are concerned about.
i'd probably opt for a cheap android tablet that's only used for fb, nothing else.
and in 'full paranoid' mode, i'd also avoid using my own home or work wifi with it, too. the library's public hotspot is convenient enough to both locations.
This.
Probably the best strategy to minimise risk from data pilfering.
I haven't used it but Firefox has containers to allow you to separate your browsing activities which are isolated from each other. You need to install the Firefox Multi-Account Containers extension in order to use them.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/
Don't use any real data and do as little as possible, but that strongly depends on the level of interacting you want to do.
Use a different browser profile entirely. I'd also reccomend LibreWolf because there's better fingerprinting protection, to help stop them from connecting dots between your other browser profiles.
This is extremely relevant to me as well.
I need even less interaction than most. I just need to check a private group I'm part of for events. Any way to extract that info into something else nicely?
I see the recommendations for FBPurity and the Firefox container, both of which I'll use on desktop. I was hoping for something for mobile too but just desktop is probably fine
Maybe a throwaway email address and use TAILS as an anonymiser which also manages the cookie cleanup. Every network session is a new clean invocation.
Maybe try using Librewolf with the Facebook container add-on?
It only knows what you tell it. Just use it like any other website, and follow the same rules you do for all websites, which is to think about what you're sharing, and only share what you're okay with them knowing.
Facebook is for local things, so it'll have to know where you live and who you are. So a VPN is kinda pointless. If you engage with three groups that are in the same village, you're probably someone from that village, you know.
You also don't need to clean cookies, because closing the browser clears the cookies, that's what private browsing is for. But even without private browsing, you should have a global sensible cookie policy that only accepted cookies from whitelisted sites, and for those sites, doesn't allow them to see cookies they didn't give you.
On the last point: The most sensible and important thing to worry about here is fingerprinting. Using a different device for every service is an effective way to combat that. It's not very practical, but specifically using your work phone that you use for other local services, to me makes a lot of sense.
Does Facebook still have an official onion url?
What would make you unsafe? What data do you want to keep away from Facebook?
Maybe safe is the wrong word in my post. I mean keeping the data safe from meta in the respect that I don't want them to have it. Their record in data privacy is not so great so I'm keen to keep my data away from Meta if I can.
What specific data?
You canβt keep information you put on their platform or your habits of use on that platform βsafeβ from it.