What Firefox Containers are and how they help

You may have heard of Firefox Containers. But do you know what they are and how they help? To understand the purpose of this feature, you need to understand how the Web site works.

And because we're going to talk about Web site tracking, we're going to take Facebook.

Maria searches for maternity clothes on a search engine and visits a few pages for more information. Later he visits Facebook and begins to see suggestions for maternity clothes, strollers and baby items in general. And Maria thinks: How does she know what I need Facebook for, since I did not search for anything on the social network.

How did this happen; The pages that Maria visited may have contained the Share and Like buttons on Facebook. The sites also likely used Facebook Pixel, the official description of which states "a Javascript code snippet that allows you to track the activity of visitors to your site."

The websites may have used ads or even tracking cookies by third parties. These cookies can associate an activity with a specific computer and remain active until they expire or are deleted from the local system.

All of these are part of your digital fingerprint, which may include personally identifiable information such as your IP address, browser information, location, or operating system.

This data is "shared" with the websites you visited and the social network. So, when Maria connects to Facebook, the cookies contained in her computer are used to identify her as a member of the social network looking for maternity clothes.

This way they follow us and show us "Related Ads", "Suggested Pages" and much more. Of course cookies and the data they contain can be shared with companies that are not affiliated at all with ads, but want them for data analytics, which help them predict behaviors or even change situations.

Facebook uses different types of tracking methods, and the example above was just one of them.

That's why Mozilla has added Facebook Container, an extension dedicated to preventing tracking.

It should be noted that not all cookies are bad. The ones you used to log in to your accounts and stay logged in are useful and it does not matter that they are stored on your computer. to save them. However, some people monitor your internet usage, even when you leave the website that served them to you. Firefox blocks third-party tracking cookies by default. But some of them can be more annoying as they use information from other cookies.

Another example.

Let's say you bought a lot of different cookies and store them in a jar all together. What will happen; The pieces and crumbs of the cookies are mixed together and a mess is created.

This is why you see ads related to a product you are looking for or buying. But at what cost? I do not know if it sounds small, but a random company may know your medical history, your insurance or banking information, your home address or information from your family.

What are Firefox Containers?

The only way to prevent cookies from being tracked is to isolate them, as if you were storing them in different jars. Here comes the Facebook Container add-on.

You can have one jar for Google cookies, another for Twitter cookies, one for Amazon, one for your bank, one for PayPal and so on. Each of them works like a digital jar that contains the cookies of the website you want. Facebook cookies are limited to one jar, and those of your bank to another.

Can the Firefox Containers extension guarantee my personal data?

Can minimize monitoring. Nothing can guarantee your privacy, because most services are constantly finding new ways to track marketing, and ads.
We live in a digital world and if you are concerned about your privacy you need to be constantly vigilant. Do not use cloud services to store your personal data and passwords. Regularly delete cookies, avoid weird websites and suspicious URLs, and delete accounts if necessary. Tor and VPN services can help, but make sure you do not use them with your regular account containers.

https://addons.mozilla.org