highlyeccentric | Facebook, evils thereof (Reply)

You may have heard that recently (in the past six months or so) FB made all profiles google-able. If you happen to be daft enough not to have screened your contact details to your facebook friends only, your details, photos, and the like may be searchable and viewable to strangers. Give some thought to changing your privacy settings.

Meanwhile... about a month ago Facebook launched another of its icky consumer based programs, called Beacon. Beacon takes your IP address (the series of numbers which identifies your computer or internet service) and communicates with other websites, including LJ, Busted Tees, the NYTimes, and STA Travel, which have agreed to feed back to Facebook information on your internet movements and especially your purchases. The information it gathers is the sort of information which spyware programs gather, but instead of installing anything on your computer, the host websites pass information straight to facebook. A full list of participating sites can be found here.
Beacon was initally opt-out, which means that it tracked and published this information without asking your permission. After protests, Facebook adjusted it to an opt-in program. That means that it will ASK you if the partner site can publish information on your profile, each time it recieves information on you. You can also opt to NEVER have this information published, by editing your privacy settings here.

However, Facebook still recieves this information. Consider this investigation, as reported on consumerist.com:

But Berteau's investigation reveals that Beacon is more intrusive andstealthy than anyone had imagined. In his note, titled "Facebook'sMisrepresentation of Beacon's Threat to Privacy: Tracking users who optout or are not logged in," he explains that he created an account onConde Nast's food site Epicurious.com, a site participating in Beacon,and saved three recipes as favorites.
He saved the first recipe while logged in to Facebook, and he optedout of having it broadcast to his friends on Facebook. He saved thesecond recipe after closing the Facebook window, but without loggingoff from Epicurious or ending the browser session, and again declinedbroadcasting it to his friends. Then he logged out of Facebook andsaved the third recipe. This time, no Facebook alert appeared asking ifhe wanted the information displayed to his friends.
After checking his network traffic logs, Berteau saw that in allthree cases, information about his activities was reported back toFacebook, although not to his friends. That information included wherehe was on Epicurious, the action he had just taken and his Facebookaccount name.

Facebook say they do not retain details of those who have opted out of Beacon. However, we have no way of knowing that they do.

For the security-cautious, you can prevent Beacon from accessing your information by using Firefox adblocking extensions. The Consumerist and Wikihow both recommend the BlockSite extension, and Wikihow has detailed instructions on installing it.
Personally, I recommend AdBlockPro, since it does all sorts of other wonderful things, like completely wipe out all evidence of LJ-Ads. Yay, bonus points to me, I get a Sponsored!Plus account and yet never have to look at the ads.

Meanwhile, for LJers too sensible to be using Facebook,