Hey all, was wondering about something. Several twit contributors have mentioned that they fuzz the data facebook gets from them and I was wondering how? I’d like to take some steps to basically hide myself, and my family, from them as much as possible.
Anyone know some strategies to fuzz facebook?
I don’t fuzz Facebook, but at home, where I do 99% of my surfing, I have all 2,500 or so Facebook domains blacklisted. In total, I have around 2.5 million tracking, malware and porn sites blocked at the DNS level on my network (PiHole for local DNS, firewall blocks clients from accessing other DNS servers or using DNS over HTTPS.
I believe @PadreSJ uses a bunch of bots that go surfing at spurious sites and using VPNs to appear to be coming from elsewhere, so that the signals the trackers receive (not just Facebook) is totally messed up.
I avoid Facebook, and Instagram, and WhatsApp, and most other social sites. I rarely install any apps on my phone, and when I do, I won’t do so if they expect to use my phone number as an identifier. (The one exception is Signal.) I disable 3rd party cookies in my browsers. I run Firefox with privacy focused plugins that disable scripts and advertising. I make an active effort to remain logged out of Google when not actively using it. (I don’t have accounts with YouTube, despite the nagging, for example.) I do maintain a fake persona whenever possible. The persona has his own email address. Any throw away account for something I don’t really care about is opened in his name. I have no idea if all my efforts are working, but it hasn’t harmed me that I am aware, and if Facebook has a shadow profile for me, it probably is very confused about who I am. If I do see any ads, they’re invariably related to clothes, feel very generic and are very ineffective as that is something I would never buy online.
Have you considered abandoning the platform? Their whole business model is based around what you’re trying to prevent, you’re metaphorically wandering around in the Lion’s den while asking how to get rid of the Lion.
If it’s about keeping in touch with family, there are so many better options available now than ~5 years ago.
unfortunately, the options would need your family/friends to switch too
Be the change you wish to see!
I’ve found that the people who matter will stay in touch regardless of the medium.
I actually don’t use Facebook to stay in touch with anyone. My use of it is pretty limited but it certainly has its place. Local community groups, marketplace, I’m getting an oculus. I also have WhatsApp which I use quite a bit to stay in touch and I will not try to convince everyone I know to switch to signal or something else.
I’ll give that extension a whirl and maybe I’ll try to figure out a way to push all traffic to them via a VPN
The problem is, even if you aren’t on the platform, unless you physically block all of their tracking domains (there were around 2,500 at last count), they still track you and make a ghost profile for you.
Ya that’s fair. So let me rephrase the question, what are some strategies to reduce how much they get from me 
Block them at the DNS level - either with something like a Pi-Hole on your home network or something like NextDNS for mobile devices.
I’m curious about nextdns
Firefox has a Facebook container system. It’s mean to limit them in the way you’re interested in.
You mean like Firefox itself or is this an add on? That sounds pretty awesome
It’s my understanding they developed the container ability as part of the base browser, but you need a plugin to make use of it specifically. As I don’t use Facebook ever, I’ve never investigated it to be honest. But it does sound promising for users who want to use Facebook but isolate it.
I use it and it works pretty well. Automatically loads FB and Instagram links in the Facebook container and allows you 3 or 4 more containers if, for example, you wanted to log into a site with different usernames.