The Facebook Beacon (and why it’s a bad idea)
Facebook have introduced a new data harvesting system to assist in targetting advertising to it’s users, using 3rd party websites to gather data on their behalf.
With the help of some clever javascript, and some co-operative 3rd party websites who have embedded this javascript into their pages, they can now update your facebook profile for you when you do things. At the moment this is done with your consent - the little popup (if you spot it) gives you the option to deny - but you can’t completely block the facility from within your facebook privacy settings - you can block it on a site by site basis, but only after the fact -a site has to have already sent an update to your account before it appears in your privacy settings.
Scary stuff. How to stop this happening to you is after the “more” link… (more…)
