Editor’s Note: Though we love to get as many ‘Likes’ on Facebook for our posts, we would still want to inform our readers of all the available options. No wonder we have had so many posts on Facebook Privacy and also an extensive article on ad blockers! Nowadays, you can hardly find any blog without a Facebook like-button next to each post. While Facebook provides an easy way to share content, the like-button is raising more and more privacy concerns. For Google Chrome users, who care about protecting their private data such as surfing history there is an easy way to disable the buttons altogether in Google Chrome with Adblock Plus. The widespread implementation of the like-button on almost every website enables Facebook to track the visits of every user and collecting data for profiling reasons – even of users who have never signed up to Facebook. The Facebook social plug-in collects all addresses of the websites a user is visiting, regardless of the fact if the like-button is clicked or not. This enables Facebook to generate a huge database about Internet users’ browsing habits and there is no way to opt-out of that. So the most efficient way to stop Facebook from saving data about you is to just block the button from being loaded on your computer. All you need to do is install Adblock Plus for Chrome and configure it with an additional filter list. Adblock Plus was originally created for the Firefox browser and only recently ported to Google Chrome as well. In no time, it has become one of the most popular extensions of the Chrome Web Store. Adblock Plus is a content blocker that is generally used to block ads, but depending on the filter settings, Adblock Plus can remove any unwanted content from the web. Users without the knowledge or time to create their own filter rules can subscribe to one or more of many free filter subscriptions. One filter list is called “Antisocial” and this removes all social bookmarking buttons from the web, including the Facebook like button. To subscribe to the Antisocial list, a user just need to access the Adblock Plus options by right-clicking on the Adblock Plus icon in the Chrome address bar. Under the “Filter lists” tab there is a field where the URL of a filter list can be manually added. In this field, the following URL needs to be pasted: https://adversity.googlecode.com/hg/Antisocial.txt The subscription to the Antisocial filter list is completed by clicking the “Add URL” button. And the next time you visit a website you can be sure that there is no way for Facebook to find out which websites you are visiting. This was a Guest post by Simon Miller, who is one of the editors of chrome-plugins.org, a non-profit project with the goal to review the best extensions, apps and themes for the Google Chrome browser.
