Tgr::Box

Disclaimer: I can’t take credit for coming up with this.  I saw this information in a comment thread on a news aggregation site and thought it would be useful to capture and rebroadcast it.

The new Facebook personalization feature extends some of the FB like/etc functionality to third-party websites.  A side effect of this “feature” is that FB gets information about one’s browsing habits on said websites whether or not one avails oneself of said feature.  If this doesn’t sound like a good deal, there is a way that this can be prevented.  Adblock Plus is a free ad and content filtering addon for the Firefox web browser.  Normally one subscribes to a service that maintains a list of common filtering rules, but it is also possible to add your own rules as well.

This is a set of rules that will thwart this cross-site snooping on the part of Facebook.  Install Adblock Plus if you do not already have it, open up the Preferences dialog box and use the Add Filters button to add the following 4 filter rules (copy these exactly, each line is one filter):

||facebook.com/*$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
||facebook.net/*$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
||fbcdn.com/*$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
||fbcdn.net/*$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net

These rules will not interfere with using Facebook itself.  What they will do is prevent other websites from talking to FB while you are using them.  If you happen to think (as I do) that Facebook should concern itself with what you do on FB, but not other websites, these filtering rules will fill the bill.

Bonus tool: The software company Untangle has cooked up a little tool you run in your browser called SaveFace.  You run it in your browser while you are logged into FB and it will lock all of your settings down to Friends Only in one easy step.  Installation and use instructions on the aforementioned page.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 20th, 2010 at 2:26 pm and is filed under Internet, Tech.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.