Facebook, evils thereof

[highlyeccentric]

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, yendi, from whom goblinpaladin first recieved this warning, is concerned about the fact that LJ/Sixapart are happily passing on our consumer information to a third party site.
I don't like the internet so much anymore. And i REALLY don't like Facebook.

ed: The NY Times presents the evolution of Beacon

Comments

[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

mind you, there are now books *I* censor, so's my mother doesn't get distressed by them.

[goblinpaladin.livejournal.com]

As in, you don't let her read ones you are reading, or you avoid reading ones she would be upset about?

[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

there have been several i've gone "ooh, mum would really like this book... no."
and Sara Douglass i leant to dad with instructions to discourage her if she took it into her head to read them.

[goblinpaladin.livejournal.com]

Heh, yeah. That particular Sara Douglass should come with "WARNING: LOTS OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE" on the cover. It's not the rape scenes so much as the callous attitude of the folk involved that is distressing.

[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

mostly the things i censor aren't sex, mind. just thigns which i know would push emotional buttons for her, and i can't do that knowingly.

[goblinpaladin.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Hell, Douglass pushed buttons for me. An' I'm hardly Mr. Emotional.

[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

*shrug* buttons it pushed for me weren't really to do with the sex. convinced me i was EEFIL by gender.

[goblinpaladin.livejournal.com]

The attitudes of the people turned my stomach. There are people so callous and brutal in the world, and...yeah. Yeuck.