Pob said:
On Windows I mostly use firefox but just for FB I use a separate browser - chrome - (thinking it minimises FB data gathering) - but until reading this thread it hadn't occurred to me to use adblock on chrome but just installed it and it works really well. Thanks. Will try the DoNotTrackMe plugin too.
I do something like this as well--keeping a separate Firefox profile just for facebook (and google+, which I still haven't really gotten into) to isolate it from everywhere else I go, along with using Ad Block and some other extensions. I believe Firefox 20 adds the feature (finally!) to open a new Incognito window within the current browser session, which I would think would isolate the data from your regular browsing and facebook browsing as well and clear all their tracking data when closed. I'm not 100% sure that they implemented it this way, though.
The other thing I like to do is to use a hosts file to essentially block, at the operating system level, various ad servers and other sketchy servers. It makes a few rare things tricky because some links that go to legitimate sites through these servers end up blocked (tracking links, basically), but I find it to be quite nice. I've used ad blocking software of various sorts for so long that when it's not around, I'm shocked by how many ads are all over the internet. Here's a link with the hosts file and instructions for installing it:
_http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm
The basic premise for how this works is that, when you go to a website, your computer asks a DNS [Domain Name System] server for the IP address from the host name (so, for example, you try to go to google.com and your computer asks the DNS server for the IP address and then the server tells your computer that it is 74.125.228.65, or whatever) and then you're computer is able to connect to it. However, your computer also has a local list of host names with associated IP addresses, which it checks before asking the DNS server, and so by installing this list your computer will check it first and then, since the list is configured with all of these domain names, the list will say either your local computer (127.0.0.1) for ad domains (so unless you're running your own web server, it simply won't connect) or the "empty" address of 0.0.0.0. This can improve how fast web pages load by not using the bandwidth to connect to these ad servers and also by not displaying their ads (which can often take a lot of processing power to do).
This is more of an advanced procedure than Ad Block and there's probably a lot of overlap, so it may not significantly improve things for you if you're already using Ad Block.
