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Facebook Will Shut Down Beacon To Settle Lawsuit

Posted by Soulskill on from the strategic-retreats dept.

alphadogg writes "Facebook has agreed to shut down its much-maligned Beacon advertising system in order to settle a class-action lawsuit. The lawsuit, filed in August of last year, alleged that Facebook and its Beacon affiliates like Blockbuster and Overstock.com violated a series of laws, including the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Video Privacy Protection Act, the California Consumer Legal Remedies Act and the California Computer Crime Law. The proposed settlement, announced late on Friday, calls not only for Facebook to discontinue Beacon, but also back the creation of an independent foundation devoted to promoting online privacy, safety and security. The money for the foundation will come from a US$9.5 million settlement fund."

16 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. What a great fiction! by schmidt349 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The idea that "privacy" continues to exist in any shape, way, or form in a world where an NSA text-mining system reads every email, text message, blog post, and Slashdot comment you ever write is laughable. Why don't these jokers go after the people who flagrantly violate your privacy every minute of every day?

    1. Re:What a great fiction! by CRCulver · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I'd like to see the article providing proof of that level of monitoring by the NSA (or any other government agency for that matter).

      Not only is there an article, there was a major governmental investigation. The European Parliament's ECHELON report provoked an enormous scandal in nerd circles when it appear. Bamford's Body of Secrets provided fuller details, many based on inside contacts.

      Sadly, things like PGP and interest in ECHELON reports seem to have become less popular among geeks. I wonder why. Sure, one might trust PGP less when there are ways to get around it or compel you personally to give up the key, but it's odd that people suddenly have zero passion for the technology.

    2. Re:What a great fiction! by schmidt349 · · Score: 5, Informative
      NSA's Domestic Spying Grows As Agency Sweeps Up Data (WSJ)

      Report: Obama to use NSA to monitor Net (USA Today)

      NSA Must Examine All Internet Traffic to Prevent Cyber Nine-Eleven, Top Spy Says (Wired)

      In short, the NSA has been reading everything sent in plaintext since Bush II, and yet the EFF spends untold millions on lawsuits to make sure that my friends on Facebook don't know what kind of pizza I order from Domino's. What a great allocation of scarce pro-privacy resources.

      I know exactly why this is: if you sue Facebook or Twitter or whatever, you get your name in the papers. If you go after the NSA you get called "soft on terror" and your campaign bid for governor of East Nowhere is sunk.

    3. Re:What a great fiction! by schmidt349 · · Score: 4, Informative

      The sad truth is that the NSA is actually reading everything via data mining. There are pictures of the "tap rooms" inside data centers of every major ISP in the US where they set up their equipment and dip into the petabytes of data that get transferred in plaintext every day. So human beings aren't reading all of your sexy letters to your girlfriend/Linux box/dog, but I'm sure the system is set up to flag "interesting" correspondence for human analysis.

      The net result for the life of the average nerd: probably not much unless you have hobbies the NSA doesn't like, such as developing cryptographic software or Islamic studies. But then killing Beacon was even less pointless privacy-wise, because it was only ever going to be used to generate data for targeting ads (which Google already does) and plastering your face on them (which Google doesn't).

      I maintain that lawyers are suing the social networking services right now because it's hip and sexy and gets you on the cover of Time. There are much more effective ways to benefit the privacy of the American people but as I said above they will likely kill the political careers these 1-800-scumbags are trying to kickstart.

    4. Re:What a great fiction! by Riachu_11 · · Score: 3, Informative

      I don't really think this is a concern. AES, for example, was vetted by a lot of very smart independent mathematicians and cryptologists who didn't find a secret back door. And brute-forcing it is impractical even if they have computers 10 Moore's law jumps ahead of ours. You should be much more concerned about being forced to give up your key.

    5. Re:What a great fiction! by Anders · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why do you believe that nuclear decay is random?

    6. Re:What a great fiction! by ssintercept · · Score: 4, Informative

      while i do not know if slashdot posts are monitored, NOVA (PBS) had an interesting documentary called -> 'The Spy Factory'.
      for the truly lazy -> http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/spyfactory/program.html
      here is a short synopsis -> http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/spyfactory/about.html
      the most telling part is:
      "NOVA follows the trail of just one typical e-mail sent from Asia to the U.S. Streaming as pulses of light into a fiber-optic cable, it travels across the Pacific Ocean, coming ashore in California, and finally reaching an AT&T facility in San Francisco, where the cable is split and the data sent to a secret NSA monitoring room on the floor below. This enables the NSA to intercept not only most Asian e-mail messages but also the entire U.S. internal Internet traffic."

      --
      "You can kill the revolutionary, but you can't kill the revolution."-- Fred Hampton
    7. Re:What a great fiction! by schmidt349 · · Score: 3, Informative

      More than a dozen people with positions everywhere from the NSA itself to AT&T have admitted roles in the construction and operation of the tap rooms. The fed has repeatedly invoked the state secrets exception to kill lawsuits that even tangentially involve the tap program. News agencies on every bar of the political rainbow have run reports confirming its existence and the New York Times at least was asked by the government not to go with its story. Now I could write a research paper meticulously documenting the outing of the spy program in the press but anyone with access to Google could do the same thing in five minutes. It exists. The only question remaining is how much data the NSA sifts through and whose, and the whistleblowers have been pretty clear on the point that the spooks aren't very discriminating. I'm sorry, but one guy on Slashdot saying "no, it isn't" can't undo three years of meticulous investigative journalism by the newspapers of record of both the left and right wings and the bravery of those involved who have admitted their involvement.

      I am thankful every day for the fact that we live in the world's leakiest democracy, so we at least know about these wanton violations of our civil rights. But after a couple of token lawsuits the EFF essentially gave up and now wastes its time keeping my pizza orders out of the hands of my Facebook pals. It's a sad day when the only outfit I can count on to fight the government out of my private life is the government.

    8. Re:What a great fiction! by Xest · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It's part of a bigger retreat I've noticed in the last decade or so in the geek community.

      Another example is DRM, in the 90s I recall there being uproar from many geeks if a company would use your CPU cycles and your memory/disk space for their commercial interest like DRM does. Nowadays whilst DRM is still complained about, the argument seems to be based on what it stops you doing or how it can go wrong, there seems to have been a retreat from the fundamental argument that they are using your property for their interests.

      Of course it sounds petty to argue about a company using a few kb on your system for some copy protection scheme or for their DRM on each of your music tracks because we have so much memory free, but that misses the point- if you retreat from your original point, you become forced to further and further give concessions where you shouldn't have to on privacy, on DRM, on whatever.

      It's that slippery slope thing, if you give them an inch they'll take a mile, and that's what's happened on many issues. Things that used to be entirely unacceptable have become accepted and the frontline in the fight for our rights has been pushed back. I don't exactly know why this is but I suspect it's because when the geeks said "Don't you dare do that" and they did it anyway, not an awful lot actually happened in response. Perhaps it's just that we had successes like the iPod which were horribly locked down and DRM'd rising to popularity and nullifying the argument that anyone other than geeks gave a shit in the first place? Bluray becoming the winning HD format despite being far more DRM laden due to BD+ and so on? Coupled on a political level with the likes of George Bush and Tony Blair winning the elections in 2004 and 2005 respectively despite having proven themselves as being willing to take away our fundamental right to freedom in the name of preventing terrorists, er, taking away our fundamental right to freedom?

      Either way it's quite sad. It amuses me now to see things like the anarchists cookbook being brought up in court trials and so on as a terrorist handbook- I don't think I knew anyone on the internet in the 90s who didn't have a copy of it, now it's being classed as basically "illegal literature".

      Something definitely went wrong somewhere in the geek movement for privacy, freedom and rights.

    9. Re:What a great fiction! by Imrik · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Is it really retreating from your point when another point becomes more important? Using up our computer resources is a relatively small annoyance compared to interfering with fair use.

    10. Re:What a great fiction! by ledow · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "More than a dozen people with positions everywhere"

      More than a dozen people in the high reaches of government have later gone on to claim that UFO's stole their washing. Astronauts claim they invented Free Energy, high-level scientists say they've cracked Fermat's Theorems without even understanding what they are. That means *nothing*. A dozen isn't a lot of people compared to the *thousands* (not even including actual government employees of any kind) that took part in or witnessed any such operation, and you can get a dozen people to admit *anything*, especially if, say, you were a large government that wanted its populous to believe it was being monitored - hell, you could even MAKE the people in question believe they've actually set up a program just by getting them to insert equipment into a room and telling them its purpose is "top secret".

      And I've never said that they weren't BUILT. I just claim that their purpose/capabilities are different to what you are assuming they are.

      "from the NSA itself to AT&T have admitted roles in the construction and operation of the tap rooms."

      Construction. Operation. Where do they mention actual real-time processing (not "if we were interested in subject X" but "finding subject X to be interested in") capabilities? That's what I'm challenging here. Not that they could monitor anyone, but that they do monitor everyone. One is easy, the other is fantasy-land even for 1984-style-governments (even China can only intercept, clumsily and publicly, some DNS and maybe search for plaintext strings of, say, "democracy" on websites and block them... and even that's got so many holes in it, it's basically worthless even on the bits it's supposed to work on).

      "The fed has repeatedly invoked the state secrets exception to kill lawsuits that even tangentially involve the tap program."
      "News agencies on every bar of the political rainbow have run reports confirming its existence and the New York Times at least was asked by the government not to go with its story."

      Standard operating procedure for anything, I should imagine, especially if the NSA are involved. That doesn't mean they have the *capability* that you're assigning to them - it just means they don't *want* you to know what they are (or more importantly, are not) capable of. Military and national-defence secrets stay secret, even if perfect knowledge of them can't help in any way (e.g. encryption techniques) purely because you don't want people to find out what you're NOT capable of.

      "Now I could write a research paper meticulously documenting the outing of the spy program in the press but anyone with access to Google could do the same thing in five minutes."

      No-one with a brain writes research papers based on stuff discovered by the press. The press are your LAST source of hard evidence in anything serious, which to me is just another pointer - if the press "know" about this stuff, it's because they are scaremongering themselves or inadvertently being used as a puppet for your government to scare you. It scares *me* that you think that only the press would be a good source or that five minutes on Google is your research - in five minutes on Google, I can "prove" the moon landings didn't happen, aliens run the planet and that Elvis is alive and has dinner with Michael Jackson on every alternate Tuesday. If "only the press" know, then the press don't know.

      "It exists."

      I don't doubt that the rooms exist. Or the equipment in those rooms exist. Or the program exists. Or even that a plan to *have* real-time analysis of the whole net exists. I doubt that the *capability* to implement it as you seem to think it works even exists anywhere, let alone inside a back room of every ISP.

      "The only question remaining is how much data the NSA sifts through and whose,"

      And what time machine they invented to cram it all into a reasonable window.

      "and the whistleblowers have been pretty clear on the point that the spooks aren't very discriminating."

  2. Hmmm if only something like that existed already by ifwm · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The proposed settlement, announced late on Friday, calls not only for Facebook to discontinue Beacon, but also back the creation of an independent foundation devoted to promoting online privacy, safety and security.

    That's great, if only something like that existed already, they could avoid the cost of starting a whole new organization.

    http://www.eff.org/

  3. mixed feelings by binaryseraph · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I am pleased that there are those who are fighting to preserve internet privacy in the face of a very aggressive marketing world. That being said, it is very hard for me to support a lawsuit against a social networking site, that 1.users have to sign up to use 2.no one pays to be a member of. 3.is not a financial/medical/etc company or something that contains what one may deem as sensitive data. While I dont know enough about the ad system they put in place, i am willing to bet one could defeat their "beacon system" by using some fairly basic practices and principals of online use. i.e. disabling cookies, monitoring what 'active-x' apps are being run and not using facebook as a means for any important communiation (or hey, just dont use facebook at all). But hey, i'm just another web user. what do i know?

    1. Re:mixed feelings by Lemmy+Caution · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The thing is, Facebook, like Google, has become the Way that Lots of Things are Just Done. Too many of my family members use it to stay in touch: if I eschewed it, it would be like not participating in the extended family. Circles of friends work the same way.

      When a social platform gets big enough, becoming a de facto standard, the choice to participate or not participate is somewhat weightier than the choice to ïbuy or not buy other types of goods.

  4. More importantly than anything, this sets a tone by StreetStealth · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The fact that Beacon is being shut down, the $9.5mil settlement, or even this nebulous new "independent foundation" are all secondary to one thing:

    This delivers the message, unequivocally, that you don't sell out your users' private actions. Sure, plenty of other businesses engage in this sort of thing all the time in much more subtle ways than broadcasting what you thought was a private transaction, but in its own way, this is a coup. It's not going to change anything, even Facebook, overnight, but it's a loud and clear warning to any business thinking of pushing its luck.

    --
    Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
  5. There is more to privacy then that by KlaasVaak · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Availability of data is way more important than data not being 100% private. Your private data in a super secret NSA database somewhere vs your private data going to people you know. I know what I'd pick thank you.

    --
    Dyslexics are teople poo