blog.plee.me About software, technology and random things

24May/110

Blocking the Facebook Like Button via Adblock Plus

Hi!

This particular tip was written over at http://www.ohnekontur.de/2011/05/13/adblock-facebook-like-button-blockieren/. Any credit goes to the original author. I am merely posting this on my blog to have a reference for myself in the long run.

You might have heard about the fact that even without clicking on Facebook's Like buttons you might be tracked by Facebook (technically it is absolutely possible for them to see which site it is you visited and had the Like button on it).

So if you are using Firefox and have the Adblock Plus addon installed (which I strongly recommend in the times of annoying flash advertisements) you can just add the following lines under the Adblock Plus preferences => "My Ad Blocking Rules":

||facebook.com^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
||facebook.net^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
||fbcdn.com^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
||fbcdn.net^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net

These rules disable any Facebook scripts that are not used from the Facebook domains (facebook.com, facebook.net, fbcdn.com, fbcdn.net) themselves, including the Like buttons or any other webpage widgets they offer.

Of course, if you are using a different browser or a different kind of ad blocking / script blocking script, the idea is the same: forbid Facebook's scripts to run anywhere but their own website.

As always, I hope to have been of any help to you.

Thanks for reading.

Comments (0) Trackbacks (0)
  1. Theoretically Facebook can and probably will track any content that is requested and downloaded from their servers. I know this blog entry primarily is about the Facebook Like button, but my intention was to effectively not have them track me at all – except when I’m on the actual Facebook pages of course. So, in a way, these rules are working perfectly for me.
    If that’s not what you wish to do, you could read up on how to write AdBlock Plus filters in order to maybe narrow these rules down a bit e.g. so that they will just work for .js files.

  2. I’m sorry but this doesn’t work right. Nowadays many sites hotlink fb-hosted images so they are blocked by this.


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