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by toss1 7 days ago
If seems this should make obsolete the setup of having a separate computer (e.g., old laptop) to isolate Facebook properties, or am I missing something where a separate machine would be advantageous?

(I avoid FB like the plague but may need to use it for some biz uses where they effectively host too large a share of the intended market)

2 comments

This has been one of my use cases for the Multi-Account Containers extension for some time now. It's actually such a motivating use case that one of Firefox explorations into a "simpler" focused UX alternative to the Multi-Account Container extension is called "Facebook Container" and does only that, isolate Facebook, specifically into its own Container.

As noted, it can't defeat all forms of device fingerprinting, but it does defeat cookie tracking.

Yeah, one of the ways I was sure the Facebook Container works is that although I pay for Youtube Premium and so ordinarily my Youtube doesn't have adverts etc inside the Facebook Container since it has no idea who I am, a Youtube video has adverts.

Facebook is so toxic now that I can't imagine allowing that to contaminate everything else. I saw today an advert which has been carefully designed to rage bait idiots, so that they can believe they're protesting government policy which doesn't exist, the makers get cheap attention for their product, Facebook gets revenue and the only loser is our society...

Facebook uses more advanced fingerprinting techniques than just cookies, even a few data points like IP address, User-Agent, and screen-size probably uniquely identify you and let them cross-correlate you between containers.

If you want actual anonymity you need to use something like the Tor Browser (which does lots of tricks to try to block fingerprinting as well as using a unique Tor circuit for every website you access).

Depends. Either you need to guard against e.g. fingerprinting the GPU, in which case you still need a separate machine, or you only need simple separation of cookies and the like, in which case you never needed that and could just use separate browser profiles. But yeah, I think in the latter case containers should work, though if it matters you should double check what exactly they do and don't separate.