Facebook Beacon Watches You Online No Matter What

Originally the Facebook Beacon feature, which allowed Facebook to track your online purchases and post info on those purchases to your news feed, garnered a fair bit of controversy forcing Facebook to make the feature an opt-in only feature. But according to study security firm CA Facebook may still be able to track your purchases even if you have opted-out of the Beacon program, and even if you aren't logged in to Facebook.

I've actually encountered this first-hand. A few weeks ago when I purchased my tickets for the midnight premier of The Dark Knight (which, by the way, was amazing) a small message popped up in the corner of my screen asking if I wanted the purchase to show up on my Facebook news feed. I was confused at first because I had immediately opted-out of the Beacon program as soon as I could do so, and I was not signed into Facebook at the time when I bought the tickets. I clicked on the option to say "no" and my ticket purchase wasn't posted in my news feed, but I found it very troubling that Facebook was still able to know what I was doing online even though I had chosen to opt-out and wasn't logged in.

According to Facebook the information is deleted from its database when someone chooses not to publish a purchase in their news feed, however I find it frightening enough that Facebook is still able to get the information without our permission. Regardless of what it does or doesn't do with the information it receives from online retailers, the fact of the matter is that it shouldn't be receiving the information in the first place.

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