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New Partnership Will Help Us Hold Facebook and Campaigns Accountable

Starting today you can download a version of the Firefox browser with the Facebook Political Ad Collector built in.

We launched a new collaboration on Monday that will make it even easier to be part of our Facebook Political Ad Collector project.

In case you don’t know, the Political Ad Collector is a project to gather targeted political advertising on Facebook through a browser extension installed by thousands of users across the country. Those users, whose data is gathered completely anonymously, help us build a database of micro-targeted political ads that help us hold Facebook and campaigns accountable.

On Monday, Mozilla, maker of the Firefox web browser, is launching the Firefox Election Bundle, a special election-oriented version of the browser. It comes pre-installed with ProPublica’s Facebook Political Ad Collector and with an extension Mozilla created called Facebook Container.

The Facebook Container, according to Mozilla, helps users control what data Facebook collects about their browsing habits when they visit sites other than Facebook.

People who choose to download the Firefox Election Bundle will automatically begin participating in the Facebook Political Ad Collector project and will also benefit from the extra privacy controls that come with the Facebook Container project. The regular version of Firefox is, of course, still available.

Think of it as turning the tables. Instead of Facebook watching you, you can maintain control over what Facebook can see while helping keep an eye on Facebook’s ads.

You can download the Firefox Election Bundle here.

If you use Firefox and already have the Facebook Political Ad Collector installed, you can install Mozilla’s Facebook Container add-on here.

If you want to find out more about the Facebook Political Ad Collector project, you can read this story or browse the ads we’ve already collected.

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