blocking facebook beacon

December 3, 2007

Facebook is a great social networking site, but their latest advertising/data collecting service has me a bit worried.

via wikihow:

How to Block Facebook Beacon

On November 6th, 2007 Facebook launched a new feature called Beacon which collects data on the behavior of Facebook users on several commercial websites such as eBay, Fandango, Zappos, and Overstock.com. ^[1] When a Facebook user purchases an item at one of these websites, Facebook provides a way for the user to advertise their purchase on their Facebook News Feed.^[2] While users can decline sending out the advertising, Facebook does not allow users to opt out of the data collection and behavior monitoring.^[3]^[4] Even if you opt out, click “no thanks”, and log out of Facebook, Beacon will still be surreptitiously collecting your web browsing behavior data and sending it to Facebook. ^[5]^[6]

For some users of Facebook, this sort of information sharing causes privacy concerns. To make matters worse, there’s no way to block Beacon in Internet Explorer (see Tips).^[7] Fortunately, an easy-to-install add-on for the Firefox browser can block Beacon from collecting any data about you. Follow these simple steps to ensure your private information remains private.