Facebook’s Beacon just the tip of the privacy iceberg
Similar (or worse) tracking and information collection rampant across industry
December 3, 2007 (Computerworld) Facebook’s Beacon ad service may, ironically, be the best thing that’s happened to the online privacy movement in a while.
The controversy raised by the social networking site’s use of the Beacon technology has helped drag into the open the widespread but hitherto largely hidden problem of online consumer-tracking and information-sharing, according to privacy advocates.
Facebook’s Beacon was released in early November as a part of its Facebook Ads platform. It is ostensibly designed to track the activities of Facebook users on more than 44 participating Web sites, and to report those activities back to the users’ Facebook friends, unless specifically told not to do so.
The idea is to give participating online companies a way to monitor the activities of Facebook users on their Web sites and to use that information to then deliver targeted messages to the friends of those Facebook users.
According to the researcher, Facebook’s Beacon tracked the activities of users even if they had logged off from Facebook and had declined the option of having their activities on other sites broadcast back to their friends.
Likely to be even more damaging was another disclosure Monday afternoon that Beacon’s tracking did not stop with just those of Facebook users. Rather, it tracks activities from all users in its third-party partner sites, including IP address data of people who never signed up with Facebook or those who deactivate their accounts.
Others simply revise privacy policies quietly when they get into new marketing agreements.
According to Montgomery, social networks are compiling elaborate profiles of their users by gathering “every bit” of data possible from the information people include in their profiles or post on the sites, and by tracking what their users do online.
A group created on Facebook to support a petition started by the MoveOn political advocacy group to protest Beacon’s lack of privacy protection added 50,000 members between Nov. 11 and Nov. 29. Facebook users in the discussion forum for that group noted that their real complaint about Beacon is that Facebook is collecting the data about their purchases.
Question 1: Do you object to your information being harvested and shared without your consent on Facebook?
cgraglia said,
January 6, 2009 @ 4:23 pm
Of course i do. I do not want my personal information such as my credit card numbers or home address being sent out to different marketers on the internet. I just feel like that is wrong and for them to not even let you know that they are doing that and to do that behind your back is even more wrong.