Keep Facebook out of your browsing

Robert Hallock 26 Jan, 2009 at 1:25pm ET Article published in Tech

Facebook has popularized a technology called Facebook Beacon which allows a growing array of partner sites to report your usage statistics back to Facebook. This usage information is then used to refine the advertising profile created expressly for your account. Call us loonies, but this privacy business squicks us out.

To combat Facebook Beacon, an author has written an experimental Firefox addon that will block the exchange of beacon data. If you’re not keen on registering to give it a go, we’ve heard that BugMeNot will bust the login block.

Comments

26 Jan 2009 ~ 4:17pm Your Friendly Neighborhood Computer Guy Does Facebook offer a way to "opt out" of this?
26 Jan 2009 ~ 4:23pm Ryder Not that I have seen.
26 Jan 2009 ~ 4:45pm Thrax No they do not.
26 Jan 2009 ~ 6:58pm NiGHTS Forgive me if I'm wrong because this might be something different, but didn't Facebook have this whole Beacon fiasco a year ago? It resulted on a user's ability to opt out of using Beacon, as well as a public apology from Zuckerburg himself.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_beacon_apology.php

Or was that just surrounding the news feed on facebook posting where you'd been recently/what you'd bought.
26 Jan 2009 ~ 7:02pm MachineDog Who is that in the picture? XD
27 Jan 2009 ~ 9:08am CyrixInstead If you go to Settings, Privacy, Applications, you can choose "Don't allow Beacon websites to post stories to my profile".
27 Jan 2009 ~ 9:33am Miltownstaydown Good thing I don't have a facebook.....