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Facebook Users Complain of New Ad-Based Tracking

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the when-aren't-they-complaining dept.

Tech.Luver noted a story about facebook users complaining over ads where their shopping habits are shared with their friends as if they are endorsing products. The neatest part is that you can opt out- if you click a box that disappears after 20 seconds... wait to long, and they assume you are totally fine with it.

3 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. I guess accuracy is too much to hope for by blowdart · · Score: 5, Informative

    The neatest part is that you can opt out- if you click a box that disappears after 20 seconds... wait to long, and they assume you are totally fine with it.

    Not true; the FaceBook provides a secondary method of opting out, just like you can control lots of privacy tweaks already. There's a nice new option for "External Websites: You can edit your privacy settings for external websites sending stories to your profile." (this is not to say there aren't privacy problems with Facebook in general)

    I guess actually looking before writing a news article would have been just too hard.

    1. Re:I guess accuracy is too much to hope for by Coopjust · · Score: 5, Informative

      The main problem is that you have to opt out AFTER a site tries (or succeeds) at adding a story to your profile. If you don't respond to the popup (20 seconds OR a blocker), it assumes that you do indeed want to add the story to your profile. While you can disable it later, it might be a few hours or days before you notice if you're not a heavy Facebook user. And, you can only disable it on a site-by-site basis in this manner.

      Many nontechnical users that have hare angry. Many Slashdotters use NoScript or something to that effect.

      If you get the Blocksite plugin and block *.facebook.com/beacon/*, you can use Facebook normally and not have to worry about sites that implement it- the script that runs the beacon never gets to run, and there is no chance for the story to be sent.

  2. Opting Out by megazork · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you look at it more closely you can't opt out of the service generally. Every time a new site tries sending stuff to your news feed you have to go back to the Facebook privacy page and opt out of that particular site.

    Aside from AdBlock, you can do the following to effectively de-activate this service:
    1. Get Firefox
    2. Download and Install the BlockSite plugin for Firefox.
    3. After restarting Firefox select 'Add-ons' from the Tools menu.
    4. Click the 'Options' button on the BlockSite extension
    5. Click the 'Add' button
    6. Enter http://facebook.com/beacon/* into the input box
    7. Click 'OK'
    8. Click 'OK' again and you are good to go.