Facebook is creeping me out again

I’m coming a little late to the party here because none of my friends buy from any of the partner sites. I’ve only recently heard about Facebook Beacon. Facebook’s EULA has long warned that they would keep tabs on you outside of the Facebook site, but I expected that they would do that through a released toolbar. I didn’t expect that they would partner with different sites.

The idea behind Beacon is that it’ll advertise what you buy or use on the ‘net. It’s ruined Christmas surprises for a few people already, showed who plays games where, and revealed real tastes in movies. The nasty parts are that it works on an opt-out principle rather than opt-in, you can’t opt-out of the entire service, it’s so easy to overlook the “No thanks, don’t advertise my purchase” button, and the button only lasts for twenty seconds.

Once you trigger Beacon through a partner you have the option of opting out of that partner. You can’t opt-out of Beaconing for a particular partner before it’s triggered. Once it’s triggered, a screen overlay is displayed for twenty seconds. If you navigate away the overlay is gone, I’m not sure if it warns you of this, and if you don’t click “No thanks” in that twenty second window Facebook assumes it’s okay to advertise.

Though you can’t easily get out of the service you can kill Beacon for now. It looks like you don’t need to be buying under the same email address as your facebook account either.

So, if Beacon creeps you out, join the protest group after blocking Beacon, browse Facebook under a different browser than your usual browser (this is a good time to try out Prism! Make sure it runs under a different profile!), and pray that Facebook doesn’t start tracking your offline purchases.