Beacon's reach extends to non-Facebook users

Macworld has new info on the scope of the information Beacon gathers on Facebook users:

While users’ activities on the Web are tracked in various ways for different purposes, most commonly with tracking cookies in banner ads, the Beacon implementation is one Berteau has never come across before in terms of the details of users’ actions that it’s able to capture and send back.

These latest findings build on Berteau’s report on Friday that Beacon stealthily tracked the activities of users on affiliate Beacon sites even if they were logged off from Facebook and had previously declined having their activities reported back to their Facebook friends.

Over the weekend, Facebook confirmed that Berteau’s report on Friday was accurate, but said that it deletes the data it gets under these circumstances.

Still, Friday’s findings deepened the privacy concerns surrounding Beacon since its introduction several weeks ago. And the admission Monday added to the concerns, since it contradicted what had, until then, been the official company line about this issue.

Thanks for the link, Karissa.

One thought on “Beacon's reach extends to non-Facebook users

  1. You’re welcome! I’ve been paying more attention to this sort of thing since it concerns me as a Facebook user and, well, I guess folks looking to enter the teaching side of academia five years ago didn’t have this stuff to worry about. Not that my internet activity has the potential to embarrass me, but the greater concern stems from the unrealistic expectations rising from the world of advertisement. As consumers we’re expected to be open to any type of prodding merely because we’re online. Most (hopefully by this point) realize that their actions on the internet are nowhere near private, but at the same time that cognizance does not mean that an online presence of any sort serves as permission for agencies to broadcast actions to others.
    The developments in this both scare me and elate me–I get the feelings confused sometimes, too, so it’s really throwing me for a loop. Awe and fear are piggybacked, in that respect, since I feel these things when I think how far things have progressed in recent years.

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