Protect Your Privacy on Facebook by Disabling Beacon
If you or your friends have visited Fandango, Overstock, Kongregate, or dozens of other sites recently while logged into Facebook, you may have noticed what you or your friends do or buy showing up your Facebook news feed. That’s because of Beacon, Facebook’s new social advertising system, which collects what you do on participating websites and sends it to Facebook for public posting. The first time you visit a participating website, a small notice will appear in the bottom-right corner of your browser asking if you want to opt-out of sending Beacon notifications for that website. If you don’t click opt-out before the message disappears… that’s it. Facebook interprets that as permission to send Beacon notifications to anyone who can read your news feed and mini feed (and anyone who can read them) and sends your personal information to its partner websites..
Not surprisingly, Beacon has come under a lot of criticism, including in the form of a petition started by MoveOn.org. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has responded with an emotional mea culpa, but, more importantly, you now have the option of disabling Beacon completely and globally, for all of Facebook’s partner sites.
To disable Beacon, log in to your Facebook account and go to your privacy settings. Click on External Applications to see the privacy settings for Beacon. You’ll see a list of any Beacon-affiliated websites that you’ve visited, and you can adjust privacy settings for individual sites there. To disable Beacon completely, check the box for “Don’t allow any websites to send stories to my profile.”
A commenter on the NYT’s “Bits” blog says:
Well, just tried to use the new opt-out feature and guess what, I can’t find it on my privacy settings page. Apparently it doesn’t show up as an option for me to select until an external website has sent me stories.
If you are unable to find the External Applications page on your privacy settings, try visiting a time-waster website like Kongregate or College Humor.
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cool, thanks for the tip
Comment posted at 12/6/07 at 9:10 am