The Core
Why We Are Here => Hardware & Technology => Topic started by: rcjordan on March 27, 2018, 04:52:50 PM
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This extension helps you control more of your web activity from Facebook by isolating your identity into a separate container. This makes it harder for Facebook to track your activity on other websites via third-party cookies.
https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/facebook-container-extension/
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That was a smart and nimble play by FF.
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Better yet, try out their Multi-Account Containers add-on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/
I like the idea, but it isn't the easiest one to work with. I have way too many accounts on some services, so I'm hoping to be able to sort them out a bit with this (possible lost cause).
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bill... I actually have that tab open in Chrome to remind myself to install it in FF.
Current method: 2 browsers (Chrome, FF), regular and incognito window in each = 4 accounts at once. That's all I need, but when I close the incognito, I lose the login info and have to log in again.
The container system looks like it could be handy
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I had tried a system of opening up different accounts in different VMs in FF, but that gets a bit resource intensive. Otherwise a combination of FF, Chrome, and Vivaldi has been my traditional method. If this Multi-Account Containers add-on works as advertised I think I could simplify things. I still keep things like personal and work accounts in separate VMs, but within those I still have a number of cases where this should come in handy.
I don't want to load up FF with extentions, so I hope that Multi-Account Containers will serve the same purpose as the Facebook one.
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Bear in mind you can launch separate Firefox profiles that keep distinct caches/cookies/passwords etc
There will undoubtedly be browser fingerprints by using profiles on the same machine (IP, super cookies, canvas etc), but there's going to be fingerprints using the same VM setup too and using a plugin like this wouldn't change that fact. Making each firefox instance truly unique would be a fair bit of work.
Multiple profiles can be pretty easy to maintain. Irony of ironies I created a setup using multi profiles to scrape 10 million FB profiles (just public data, though, and using about 4000 profiles on the same machine) and the cherry on the top was that FB anti-scraping mitigation is one of the most stringent of the social networks. Outside of tracking it did seem to be more data input orientated than client fingerprints (other than IP)
The anti-FB data-collection angle is a nice PR coup, and FB is probably being less than aggressive ATM given the bad press.
Surely it's a case of 'best efforts' to keep thing separate, given all the tracking methods going about (see that recent one using CSS).
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Bear in mind you can launch separate Firefox profiles that keep distinct caches/cookies/passwords etc
I do that for cases when I don't need them all open at the same time. But unless I'm missing something, you cannot open multiple profiles at once
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I can't recall what command line opts to use but yes, you can use multiple profiles at the same time (as separate processes). Creating a launch icon with those args is probably the easiest way to go.
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ADDED
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The Multi-Account container is handy, but would be even more handy if you could disable add-ons on a container-by-container basis. One reason I open a "light" profile is because of certain sites that don't work well with add-ons
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It would also be nice if they had some way to backup, export, and restore these settings. I have to do setup on every different machine and VM. A bit of a PITA.
I did setup a few FF instances to keep Google accounts and SNS accounts in their own areas. Looks like it's working.
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Facebook Container extension now includes Instagram and Facebook Messenger
https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/facebook-container-extension-now-includes-instagram-and-facebook-messenger/