Facebook Beacon Privacy Issues Worse Than Previously Thought?

An anonymous reader writes "Further developments in the Facebook Beacon affair ... According to PC World, a Computer Associates researcher claims that Beacon, when installed on participating sites, is sending data about users' activity back to Facebook, even when a user is logged out of Facebook - despite Facebook's claims to the contrary."

Comments

FredDC

[FredDC]

No privacy on a social networking website? I am shocked!
</sarcasm>

Re:FredDC

[Anonymous Coward]

no privacy OFF a social networking site.. you should be shocked. repeatedly.

Re:FredDC

[zenetik]

What made Facebook different from other social networking sites is that, in the beginning, it was a social network available only to college students. Within that exclusive bubble, members existed within communities limited to members of their college or university. By default, profiles were only available to be seen by academic peers -- the people you have class with or pass by on campus. Before Facebook opened its doors to everyone, most Facebook social connections were those that already existed in the real-world, so privacy wasn't as big as an issue because it remained private within a limited community of peers. Facebook built its success on this exclusive-access strategy and Facebook users have become accustomed to a certain level of privacy not found on other social networks such as MySpace, where social connections are less about adding actual friends as they are about racking up a huge number of virtual friends they've never actually met. In this sense, Facebook has broken the trust with the very users that have made it successful by taking away people's decision to decide what to share with their friends and what not to -- and going a step further by making that information available to third parties. Facebook users view this as a betrayal of an unspoken social contract and they have every right to feel this way because it is a sudden and drastic change of direction from what they've been led to expect over the past few years.

Microsoft and $$$

[vaderhelmet]

What were we to expect with money to be had? They need something to justify that ridiculous price tag they've given themselves. Users = dollar signs to them. It's funny how every time they add a feature that invades the users' privacy to make money, they release some statement like "Oh, once users calm down, they'll find these services to be useful." Putting in privacy controls and restrictions later means they get away with more and only have to patch what users find out and complain about. That being said, don't claim malicious intent where ignorance is just as likely the cause. (Full Disclosure: I was one of the users who has been banned from Facebook for posting negative comments ("spam") during the mini-feeds debacle. So I have some negative bias.)

Re:Microsoft and $$$

[rucs_hack]

This is all a bit silly to me. Ok, so people are annoyed at Facebook, and I see the story has been tagged BigBrother. That's utter rubbish for a start, but of exactly the kind you expect from people who don't really know what big brother represents in 1984, or never read the bookt.

Why can't it be Big Brother? It's an elective free service, which is two things that the figure Big Brother in 1984 most definatelly does not represent. You are under no obligation to use it. That's all there is folks, don't like it? Don't use it, problem solved.

People do like it though, most of the people I know who are on it don't care about this new storm+teacup, which they view as, well, not worthy of notice. Facebook does what they want, end of problem. I use it too. Ok I block the sidebar beacon adverts, but otherwise I like it.

Oh yes, and online shopping is going to be tracked by everyone who can possibly manage it soon. It's big, big money. So Facebook are doing it now, well, give it a year or so and try to find a free online service of this type that doesn't do tracking, or promises not to in the future.

I think you better look up Diogenes for advice first mind.

Re:Microsoft and $$$

[mrbluze]

Why can't it be Big Brother? It's an elective free service, which is two things that the figure Big Brother in 1984 most definatelly does not represent. You are under no obligation to use it. That's all there is folks, don't like it? Don't use it, problem solved.

Now, if I remember correctly (I haven't read 1984 for a few years now), it is Big Brotherish. I mean, sure, it's not enforced, default, systematic spying by a government, but the Big Brother scenario did not get that way overnight in the book. It took many years of phasing in. I think it's discussed in the part where the main character is reading Emmanual Goldstein's highly illegal and very sensational alternative history of the world. (Even that bit is ringing true nowadays)

Re:Microsoft and $$$

[karolo]

In think you are presenting an partial conclusion on what 1984 is about, for starters Orwell was a communist, only not of the type that Stalin liked.
The point of 1984 is how power perpetuates itself through the establishment of a reign of fear (like Stalin did with the purges) through constant surveilance of the people and the presence of an external enemy, whether real or imagined, as tools to control dissent and keep power for its own sake. There is nothing in a capitalist society to stop that from happening, I would say more, because of the way people are lulled into a sense of security an advanced consumerist capitalist society are more likely to fall for it because they feel they have more to lose if the "enemy" wins, and they are more ready to let the changes creep in in the name of security and comfort.

Re:Microsoft and $$$

[wish bot]

You're going to seriously tell me that when all these people joined FB of their own volition that they wanted their web browsing habits to be tracked, stored, and probably acted on in some fashion? I think it's more likely that they joined so they could hook up with their friends...you know, kind of like what FB was actually about. The subsequent invasion of privacy, tracking and collation of personal habits certainly IS very 'big brotherish' if you want to participate in modern society in any meaningful form. Or you could sever all ties to the internet, "opt-out" and go and live under a rock, is that the choice that what you call 'capitalism' has given us?

Re:Not sure how this works

[Achromatic1978]

I would presume that rather than removing cookies upon 'logout', they keep a note of the fact you're logged out, and continue to track that cookie, knowing that the last logged in user was you.

Get 'em young and innocent

[gihan_ripper]

This is just the next in a long line of privacy violations by social networking sites such as Facebook. They target a primarily young and non tech-savvy audience so they can get away with the most atrocious breaches in privacy until they overstep the boundary and do something that's blatantly egregious, even to the most innocent Internet users. With Beacon, Facebook allowed other users to see our online shopping habits. I feel that the latest revelation about Beacon "calling home" won't be as resonant with the general public. We've gotten used to a data-mining culture and don't worry about some faceless "they" having access to all this information. Perhaps if we imagined these personal details being broadcast on national TV, it would be a different story.

Re:Get 'em young and innocent

[dyfet]

Yes, but in a culture built around American Idol and reality TV, people WANT to have the personal details of their lives broadcast on national TV! ;)

Re:Block the "Feature"

[Dogtanian]

This might be useful for some people. It shows you how to block Facebook's Beacon. Not to demean the solution you gave, which I'm sure does its intended job well. However, it's really just a technical fix that is papering over one of the symptoms.

It doesn't- and can't- address the far more serious underlying cause. Namely that Facebook and the other companies involved are clearly totally contemptuous of their users' privacy and quite happy to screw them over in the name of a few quick bucks. And then hide this behind a weaselish and unclear "opt-in-by-default" agreement. (Yes, it's acceptable for them to make money from a free website; no, it's absolutely *not* acceptable for them to do it in this way).

Frankly, I'm glad I don't use Facebook. At one stage I may have believed that it was possibe to balance the invasion one's privacy by controlling what appeared on their page- and then some low-down **** like this comes along. It's one thing to have your Facebook information publicly available, quite another to have your activities on apparently unrelated sites made public.

I wouldn't touch Facebook with a ******* barge pole now. Your fix may work on the current problem, but what happens when the next moneygrabbing exploit comes along? What happens when these assholes figure out a totally different way to use the information they already have on you?

Seriously, fuck that, and fuck Facebook. Their behaviour was already unacceptable- regardless of how they snuck it into the legal agreement. With this latest news on top, I seriously hope that this marks a turning point in Facebook's fortunes. Joe Public isn't as concerned about his privacy as he should be, but when it comes to blabbing about his Christmas present purchases without his knowledge, it puts it in more concrete terms.

Not the best friends

[aws910]

I had re-joined some social networking sites recently, and this was my pretense. However, it made me realize that if these "old friends" were such great people, I would have kept in touch with them. With each "old friend", I realized that there was some fatal flaw that made me not want to keep in touch with them anyway.
Honestly, how long do you want to dwell in the past? The future is so wide open...