facebook's beacon...

[flaviomatani]

Amid heightened concerns surrounding Facebook's new advertising platform, the social networking site has given users a new reason not to trust it: Researchers recently busted the company for tracking users activities on external sites, even after they logged out of Facebook. ... Article in Wired ...

They mention a Firefox extension that can block this activity, which can be found here.

Comments

[gaius-octavian.livejournal.com]

Doubleclick et al have been doing this ever since banner advertising began; Wired in technologically-illiterate shocker.

[redcountess]

I've been using other extension they mention, Adblock Plus, for ages for banner advertising anyway, and it was pretty easy to add the beacon site as a filter to that.

[gaius-octavian.livejournal.com]

I would not even be slightly surprised that Wired get enough ad revenue from Doubleclick that they quietly look the other way.

[djpsyche.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. I was on Facebook a couple of weeks ago and noticed they'd put an announcement on my page about recipes I'd recently added to my recipe box on epicurious.com. How the fuck did they know? And when the fuck did I tell them I wanted them to broadcast that to everybody? I mean, it's recipes, big wow, but what else are they spying on? I haven't been back on Facebook since.