‘Contain’ the Tracking of Facebook with the New Mozilla Firefox Extension

Developing software solutions has become a very lucrative business, with all the evolving technologies in the world today. Social media websites such as Facebook now play a huge part in people’s lives, impacting daily activities as well a business transaction.

Facebook with the New Mozilla Firefox

Since the business software market evolves so fast, it’s important to keep track of the latest software trends in the market to use technology as a strategic benefit to an organization. Functional and tech enhancements in business software could have a huge impact on how a business functions.

The working environment in the whole world is changing really fast. The world now has shifted from the traditional style of working towards a much techno-savvy and sophisticated one. To accomplish the transformation, organizations take the course of advanced tech and using computers extensively.

The main reason in going for software development is to provide growth and value to user requirements. Developing software solutions fundamentally must cater to user needs and requirements to accomplish the requirement. Such development helps a user carry out the desired tasks. The world is witnessing a dazzling growth of information technology due to the higher need for software services provided by many IT consulting firms.

CONTAIN FACEBOOK TRACKING WITH A MOZILLA FIREFOX EXTENSION

One of the products of numerous software development programs includes Mozilla Firefox. The extension is created by Mozilla for the Firefox browser that may have or ‘contain’ all of Facebook’s following and stop followers from following an individual outside of the container and around the web. The extension of Firefox utilizes an experimental technology that Mozilla’s been developing for Firefox Nightly for the last couple of years, but also available as a different Multi-Account Containers extension for Firefox.

FIREFOX CONTAINERS

Mozilla, two years ago announced its- experimental feature, which was called ‘containers’. It would essentially build ephemeral browser accounts or identities in the same browser window. The containers would enable one to keep browsing identities separate. Mozilla made four main browsing activity containers, namely, Personal, Work, Banking, and Shopping.

Furthermore, the containers of Mozilla are a different take on Google’s own numerous browser profiles idea that enables creating various accounts in Chrome. Nevertheless, the accounts are more permanent, and one has to use a different browser window for every one of them. As a response to the recent Facebook as well as Cambridge Analytica scandal, Mozilla wanted to make things even much easier for users, thus it created an extension, which only allows a Facebook container that would keep all of Facebook’s tracking isolated within the container.

THE NEW FACEBOOK CONTAINER EXTENSION

Unlike Tracking Protection, another Firefox feature, which blocks most tracking scripts on the web, a new extension would not block the tracking of Facebook completely but would isolate tracking within the container of Facebook. The advantage of the new extension is that a user won’t experience any breaking of the web, as sometimes experience with anti-trackers unless Facebook halts it service from working within the container somehow.

When the extension is installed, it would delete all existing Facebook cookies and log out of the service. The next time a user visits Facebook, it would open it in a blue-colored browser tab, which is a container tab. When clicking on a non-Facebook link, the link would open outside of the Facebook container. When clicking on any Facebook Like or Share buttons on the web, even when browsing the web on other tabs, the links would open in the Facebook tab, ensuring further that all Facebook-related activity occurs inside the container of Facebook. Since the tracking is not really blocked within the container, the liking or sharing activity would still be recorded and sent to Facebook

A STRONGER PRIVACY STANCE

Gradually but steadily, Mozilla has been embracing a much stronger privacy stance. Mozilla has been adding privacy-preserving features to the browser in the past few years. This augmented third-party privacy extensions such as ExpressVPN’s Mozilla Firefox VPN extension.  While the revenue of the company still depends on advertising, recently it also ‘paused’ the Facebook ads over the Cambridge Analytics scandal, to allow Facebook to know that such sharing of data practices are not acceptable. The new container is another step in a similar direction, to provide benefits to users.

The Facebook Container Extension works through isolating one’ identity in a ‘separate container’ that makes it more difficult for Facebook to track the activity across the web through third-party cookies. In the spirit of declaring its privacy standards, Mozilla state that they do not collect data when users use the Facebook Container extension and they only know the number of times the extension is removed or installed. The announcement is timely since the issue of online privacy is getting more and more a hot topic after the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica story. Nonetheless, the extension could prove to be useful to those who do not like to be tracked everywhere by Facebook receive ads.

With the continuous technology evolution, software development jobs continue to grow. Now more than ever is a good time to become a software professional.

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