Facebook Beacon

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Beacon is a part of Facebook's advertisement system that sends data from external websites to Facebook, ostensibly for the purpose of allowing targeted advertisements and allowing users to share their activities with their friends. Certain activities on partner sites are published to a user's News Feed. Beacon was launched on November 6, 2007 with 44 partner websites.[1]

Contents

[edit] Privacy concerns

Beacon created considerable controversy soon after it was launched, due to privacy concerns. On November 20, 2007, civic action group MoveOn.org created a Facebook group and online petition demanding that Facebook not publish their activity from other websites without explicit permission from the user. In less than ten days, this group gained 50,000 members.[2] Beacon was later changed to require that any actions transmitted to the website would have to be approved by the Facebook user before being published.[3] On November 29, 2007, Stefan Berteau, a security researcher for Computer Associates, published a note on his tests of the Beacon system, and found that data was still being collected and sent to Facebook despite users' opt-outs and not being logged into Facebook at the time.[4][5] This revelation was in direct contradiction to the statements made by Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook's vice president of marketing and operations, in an interview with The New York Times published the same day:

Q. If I buy tickets on Fandango, and decline to publish the purchase to my friends on Facebook, does Facebook still receive the information about my purchase? A. “Absolutely not. One of the things we are still trying to do is dispel a lot of misinformation that is being propagated unnecessarily.”[6]

On November 30, 2007, Louise Story of The New York Times blogged that not only had she received the impression that Beacon would be an explicit opt-in program, but that Coca-Cola had also had a similar impression, and as a result, had chosen to withdraw their participation in Beacon.[7]

On December 5, 2007, Facebook announced that it would allow people to opt-out of Beacon.[8] Founder Mark Zuckerberg apologized for the controversy.

This has been the philosophy behind our recent changes. Last week we changed Beacon to be an opt-in system, and today we're releasing a privacy control to turn off Beacon completely. You can find it here.[9] If you select that you don't want to share some Beacon actions or if you turn off Beacon, then Facebook won't store those actions even when partners send them to Facebook.

On August 12, 2008, a class action lawsuit was filed against Facebook, Blockbuster Inc., Overstock.com, Fandango, Hotwire.com, GameFly, Zappos.com, and any additional "John Doe" corporations that activated Facebook Beacon when they released their common member's personal information to their Facebook user friends without their consent through the Facebook Beacon program. The lawsuit alleges the release of the information was a violation of the Video Privacy Protection Act, Electronic Communication Privacy Act, Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, California Consumer Legal Remedies Act, and the California Computer Crime Law.[10][11]

[edit] Technology

Facebook Beacon works through the use of a 1x1 GIF web bug on the third-party site and Facebook cookies.[12] Clearing Facebook cookies from the browser after explicitly logging-off from Facebook will prevent the third-party site from knowing a user's Facebook identity.[13]

[edit] Partner websites

Based primarily on Facebook's initial press release, the current list of Beacon partner websites includes:

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ "Leading Websites Offer Facebook Beacon for Social Distribution". http://www.facebook.com/press/releases.php?p=9166. Retrieved on 2007-12-03. 
  2. ^ "Petition: Facebook, stop invading my privacy!". http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5930262681. Retrieved on 2007-12-03. 
  3. ^ "Facebook Beacon update: No activities published without users proactively consenting". http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=7188. Retrieved on 2007-12-03. 
  4. ^ "Facebook's Beacon More Intrusive Than Previously Thought". http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140182-c,onlineprivacy/article.html. Retrieved on 2007-12-03. 
  5. ^ "Facebook's Misrepresentation of Beacon's Threat to Privacy: Tracking users who opt out or are not logged in.". http://community.ca.com/blogs/securityadvisor/archive/2007/11/29/facebook-s-misrepresentation-of-beacon-s-threat-to-privacy-tracking-users-who-opt-out-or-are-not-logged-in.aspx. Retrieved on 2007-12-03. 
  6. ^ "Facebook Executive Discusses Beacon Brouhaha". http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/facebook-responds-to-beacon-brouhaha/. Retrieved on 2007-12-03. 
  7. ^ "Coke Is Holding Off on Sipping Facebook’s Beacon". http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/30/coke-is-holding-off-on-sipping-facebooks-beacon/. Retrieved on 2007-12-03. 
  8. ^ announcement
  9. ^ privacy control
  10. ^ Vijayan, Jaikumar (2008-04-18), "Blockbuster sued over Facebook Beacon information sharing". Computerworld, [1].
  11. ^ Gohring,Nancy(2008-08-13), "Facebook faces class-action suit over Beacon". networkworld, [2].
  12. ^ "Privacy Policy - Third Party Advertising" (HTML). http://www.facebook.com/policy.php. Retrieved on 2007-12-04. 
  13. ^ "Deconstructing Facebook Beacon JavaScript" (HTML). http://www.radiantcore.com/blog/archives/23/11/2007/deconstructingfacebookbeaconjavascript. Retrieved on 2007-12-24. 

[edit] External links

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