With the latest changes to Facebook, I’ve again concerned myself with privacy matters. Perhaps the most noticeable change is the Live Feed Ticker, but that’s not what really concerns me; it’s just annoying and exposes their awful privacy model (although there are ways to protect your information on Facebook).

I’m generally an open book, not afraid to disclose much about myself, although I know many others who are much more circumspect about their personal information. To them I say:

It is foolish to trust anyone else on the Internet to safeguard your privacy, particularly where there is no fiduciary obligation and they are motivated to do otherwise.

Having become somewhat impatient with people who expect corporations to protect their privacy, I offer this harsher corollary:

If you’re not prepared to have potentially everyone see something, don’t post it on the Internet!

Still, what Facebook is doing is exceedingly invasive and it’s appalling that your privacy on Facebook is subject to the kindness of others. *sigh*

Yet, what particularly bothers me is that corporations are profiting from the trade in personal information and I am not going to cooperate.

Some time ago, I began to use different browsers for various purposes. I wanted to separate my anonymous and pseudonymous browsing from sessions where I use my real identity. The motivation was to prevent access to browser cookies that may contain personal identifying information by other sites. Although I’ve long been a Mozilla Firefox user, when I signed-up for Google+ I decided to use Chromium, the free/libre open source variant of Google’s Chrome for browsing when using my real identity. I figured, Chrome/Chromium might offer a better selection of add-ons for Google+, so long as it was in beta testing anyway. I prefer Firefox for its variety of add-ons, some of which I’ve become quite attached to using on a regular basis but are unavailable other browsers, such as Delicious with its nice sidebar for navigating my social bookmarks and Tree-style Tabs, which I have open in another sidebar. Many add-ons are available for protecting privacy (e.g., CookieSafe, Beef Taco Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-out, BetterPrivacy, Ghostery, ShareMeNot and TrackMeNot), making Firefox particularly well-suited to be my browser of choice for anonymous/pseudonymous browsing.

Every link posted on Facebook is encoded with a redirection through Facebook’s own site so your clicks are tracked and your browsing patterns can be analyzed. This is not new; what is new is that Facebook has enlisted other sites in its scheme to collect even more information about users’ browsing patterns. What began with the insidious Like button appearing on pages all across the web has now evolved into what Facebook calls frictionless sharing, which is really quite invasive. For example, when I now click on a link to an article at The Guardian, instead of being presented with the story I am instead redirected to sign-up for a web application that will allow Facebook to capture all my future browsing activity on the Guardian website, whether directed there from Facebook or not. Consequently, I no longer want to open a link in a browser that has stored Facebook cookies that such sites can use to correlate my session with my Facebook account.

I’ve chosen to dedicate yet another browser to Facebook sessions. I needed one with good privacy capabilities and which allows links to be easily opened in another browser — a different browser program, not just a separate tab or window. For the same reasons I selected Firefox for my anonymous/pseudonymous browsing — and for its flexible Open With extension — I thought it would be my best choice for this purposes, too. However, I needed to ensure that it was configured to have a separate user profile for storing cookies and other data apart from that stored for my anonymous/pseudonymous sessions. Firefox has such a configuration capability, allowing for different persona profiles, but I found that concurrent usage was problematic (at least on Debian GNU/Linux); I could use different profiles only by closing and restarting the browser. The solution I settled upon was to use Iceweasel the Debian variant of Firefox (differing only in branding and currency of updates).

In summary, I have opted to use separate browsers for various purposes as follows:

• Firefox – for general browsing; either anonymously or using a pseudonym
• Iceweasel – for browsing Facebook only; opening external links in Firefox
• Chromium – for browsing Google+ and other sites using my real identity

EDIT (2011-10-11): I found that a recent update to Iceweasel (now based on Firefox 7.0) introduced a conflict that prevented it from running concurrently with with Firefox. To resolve this problem, I modified the launcher commands on my panel icons to invoke each program using the -no-remote parameter, which opens a separate browser instance. An argument for the -P parameter specifies which profile to use: default for Firefox; facebook for Iceweasel. Actually, this means that I needn’t use Iceweasel at all, rather I could just use Firefox to achieve the same results; one advantage to retaining Iceweasel, however, is that the program icons on the task bar clearly distinguish the different sessions.