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Using Firefox Multi-account containers for improving Privacy

Jul 30, 2021 by Kolappan N

Firefox’s multi account container is a feature that provides isolated containers or profiles within Firefox. Each container has separate cookie, cache, etc… and are isolated from one another. If I log into Google in one container the other container will not have any details of that Google account. You can also set a website to open in a certain container. Combine this with Firefox’s tracking protection feature this will prevent a website in one container from tacking you on another container. This is a very powerful privacy tool at your disposal and here is how I use it.

I created the following containers to isolate my browsing data from the big tech and assigned each of them corresponding websites.

  1. Facebook - Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger.
  2. Google - Google, YouTube, GMail, Google Drive, Google Docs, Firebase, etc…
  3. Amazon - Amazon, Twitch, Goodreads, IMDB, AWS, etc…
  4. Microsoft - Microsoft, Office.com, OneDrive, Outlook, Skype, Xbox, GitHub, Teams, Azure, etc…

So any websites that require login from a Google, FB or Amazon account will also be added to these containers. The outcome is that I will not login with my Google account outside the Google container. So the tracked data from Google Analytics, etc… outside of the Google container will not be linked to my Google account.

The next step is creating containers based on the context of browsing such as follows

  1. News - It was a huge surprise to me but news website use a lot of trackers than any other kind of websites I see. I guess it is by product of them using a lot of different ad providers.
  2. Entertainment - Next to news websites sites like Spotify use a lot of trackers and analytics. All the OTT websites will be added to this container.
  3. Shopping - Every shopping website expect amazon are grouped here. I don’t want ads based on my shopping searches everywhere I browse.
  4. Government Websites - Why not?
  5. Banking - This is just to be on the safe side.

You can add as much containers as you need and assign them websites. The initial setup will take sometime. I had to open the every website in their corresponding container and set it to always open in that container. But it is totally worth the effort.