Keeping social media away from your browsing

As much as we want to stay away from sites like Facebook, like that weird uncle your family doesn’t talk about, it still creeps into our lives. Here’s what I do to minimize social media sites encroaching on my browsing life.

Create a social media profile (or container)

If you use a Chromium based browser such as Chrome, Edge, or my favorite, Brave, they have the ability to create different profiles. Firefox has a similar feature called containers. The idea behind profiles and containers is to isolate browsing sessions. What happens in one profile doesn’t affect anything in another profile. A good rule of thumb is to, at the very least, separate your work life from your personal life. You don’t want your Kohls browsing to show up in your work history.

I create a social media profile and only use social media sites in that profile. In fact, because I trust Facebook just about as far as I can throw it, FB gets its own special profile. Now if I need to use FB I open up its profile and close it as soon as I can. I still feel dirty, but instead of feeling like I crawled through a pipe at the end of The Shawshank Redemption, I feel more like I’ve been sitting in the Florida humidity in the middle of summer. Uncomfortable, but at least I don’t smell as bad.

• Socialmedia
• Facebook
• Chrome
• Brave
• Firefox