5 ms·
Facebook's Beacon More Intrusive Than Previously Thought
- Tichy 19y agoI don't know exactly how Beacon works, but here is a rough guess to explain what happened to the author of that article: presumably if you connect to a partnering service, some kind of negotiation takes place to let that service know your Facebook id and wish to log your activities. Not sure if it involves a direct communication between Facebook and partnering site, but I suppose it does (if internet security mechanisms work as they should, there should be no other way). So now if user logs off from Facebook, partnering site doesn't know about that - how would it? Logging off from Facebook has nothing do with partnering site. Hence partnering site keeps sending information to Facebook. Measures could be taken by Beacon to avoid that, but not straightforward. I would expect that if the user deletes all cookies etc and reconnects to partnering site, no information will be sent to Facebook. Nevertheless, I think many other sites could easily employ something like beacon, without telling the users. I always assumed that lot's of web sites already do that (connected via the ad networks).