After the Facebook data controversy, a lot of users have been deleting their accounts or disabling the data sharing on Facebook Platform. For those who cannot bid farewell to the biggest social media network, Mozilla has announced an add-on for Firefox browsers called the Facebook Container. The add-on isolates your Facebook identity from your other web activity.
In simple words, this new plugin makes it difficult for Facebook to collect your online activity outside Facebook to send you targeted ads. Once the add-on is installed, the user can continue to use Facebook as before, however, Facebook will now show advertising based only on the activity on the social network.
For the last couple of years, Mozilla has been working on technologies that help online users manage their security and privacy. They have accelerated their work on this technology in response to the recent violations of user privacy and data breaches. The newly released add-on enables users to continue getting a value from a service without the fear of comprising their security. Mozilla claims that the type of data that was acquired by Cambridge Analytica could have been easily restricted with the use of Facebook Container.
An enormous amount of data is being collected by applications to study user behavior and provide contextual content. These applications are so complex in terms of technology that users may not fully understand the implications of putting information on them. The web activity of users provides a gateway into their lives, hobbies, relationships and most importantly political views. Facebook has deployed a number of trackers on various websites that are so complex that you may not know that a code is tracking you invisibly. They were also found to be tracking call and SMS history on mobile phones.
Mozilla believes that users of the internet deserve to be able to use the internet on their own terms. Therefore, Facebook Containers provides you an option to limit the access to your personal data. It can be found here and can be integrated into Firefox browsers. Mozilla has clarified that they are not singling out a single social media network but focusing on all web applications on a whole. Before the release of the add-on, Mozilla has also paused all advertising on Facebook and will be resuming after the social network has deployed effective tools that restrict access to user data.
Image Source: Mozilla Blog
