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 3^rd party web­sites to gather data on their behalf.

With the help of some clever javas­cript, and some co-operative 3^rd 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…

How­ever, for­tu­nately, some people have figured out that all you Fire­Fox users out there can block the beacon. Oth­ers who don’t want to do this — if you’re logged out of Face­book, I believe the javas­cript won’t work. So as long as you dili­gently click that “log out” link every time — you should be fine too.  Now we know why Face­book finally intro­duced the “keep me logged on” option a few weeks ago — it’s needed for this activ­ity track­ing feature.

Accord­ing to the press release (linked below) there are 44 sites which might “ping“your activ­ity to Face­book — how­ever I’ve yet to loc­ate a defin­it­ive list of the sites I should avoid — how­ever some are lis­ted at the end of that press release.

Other rel­ev­ant links:

Face­book Has Become Evil

Pro­ject Beacon — Does Face­book know too much

Block Face­book Beacon

Face­book Beacon Press Release

Thanks to Doc­torVee for finally giv­ing me the incent­ive to write a post I should have found time to write a few days ago.

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