How To: Block Personal Facebook Data from Third-Party Websites with "Facebook Disconnect"

"Connect via Facebook" — these words are coated on over a million websites nowadays, but Facebook Connect poses a risk of leaking personally identifiable information to those third parties.  If you're not convinced Facebook Connect is safe, then turn off the flow of personal data to those websites!

Facebook Disconnect

Brian Kennish, an engineer at Google, has developed an extension for the Google Chrome web browser, called "Facebook Disconnect".  This extension blocks all traffic from third-party sites to Facebook servers when browsing the web via Chrome.  You will still be able to access your Facebook account itself, so for those of you who want to get rid of Facebook completely, check out some of the more drastic options.

BEFORE:

And AFTER:

To use Facebook Disconnect, simply download and install the extension, available here.

Kennish states:

"Although I'm an engineer at Google on the Chromium project, the work here is entirely my own and in no way endorsed by Google."

For those of you who don't use Google Chrome, there's another option— Adblock Plus.

Adblock Plus

Adblock Plus is a content-filtering extension for Mozilla Firefox, and it's available on their website or directly from Mozilla Add-ons.

"Annoyed by adverts? Troubled by tracking? Bothered by banners? Install Adblock Plus now to regain control of the internet and change the way that you view the web. You can also choose from over forty filter subscriptions to automatically configure the add-on for purposes ranging from removing online advertising to blocking all known malware domains."

Here's an overview with complete instructions from ProCasts, showing how it works, how to install it, uninstalling it and how to get help:

NoScript

Another possibility for Firefox and SeaMonkey users is NoScript, available on their website or from Mozilla Add-ons.

"The NoScript Firefox extension provides extra protection for Firefox, Seamonkey and other mozilla-based browsers: this free, open source add-on allows JavaScript, Java and Flash and other plugins to be executed only by trusted web sites of your choice (e.g. your online bank), and provides the most powerful Anti-XSS protection available in a browser."