Earlier this week in chatting with tmarthal, I mentioned I was done with Facebook due to their advertising platform, aka beacon. He was unaware of such things and wanted to know why I didn’t blog about it. I didn’t because nearly every blogger out there already had, and I figured it was common knowledge, even moveon.org started a campaign against it. Obviously I was wrong, and he found it serious enough to email me articles and even twitter about it in the next couple hours following our chat.
Anyway, Facebook changed their policy late this week by providing an “opt-in/out” feature for users. So I will blog about the change and explain why I am still done with Facebook.
The change in Facebook policy doesn’t change the core privacy issue, which is, giving users the ability to control information sharing from affiliate sites to the Facebook platform.
As the CA Security Advisory Blog Points out in Facebook’s Misrepresentation of Beacon’s Threat to Privacy: Tracking users who opt out or are not logged in.:
Facebook is collecting information about user actions on affiliate sites regardless of whether or not the user chose to opt out, and regardless of whether or not the user is logged into Facebook at that time.
The blog post then goes onto provide the complete analysis by looking at the HTTP requests.
Personally, my biggest problem with beacon is that Facebook continues to collect information about me without my permission. Consolidating, analyzing and potentially sharing that information over time is extremely powerful and potentially dangerous.
If beacon is not a serious invasion of privacy, then I don’t know what is, but I know I’m not going to take part in it, at least until Facebook makes more changes.
So for now, I’m done with Facebook, and it’s not exactly like I ever did much with it anyway. Logging in once every 3 weeks to see who super poked me or killed a vampire can only be so exciting.
If you continue to use Facebook, here are some steps you might want to take to block the beacon, with the BlockSite plugin for Firefox probably being the most effective as long as you use Firefox, which I don’t for day to day browsing, so I’m done.
