Consumerist: Beacon

Woman Sues Blockbuster For Telling All Her Facebook Friends What She Was Renting

Meg Marco — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:24:50 EDT

Facebook's Beacon has finally resulted in a lawsuit. A Texas woman has sued Blockbuster for participating in Beacon, claiming that "Blockbuster violated the federal Videotape Privacy Protection Act by sharing information about her movie rentals and sales with Facebook without first obtaining her written consent," says MediaPost.

She's seeking class action status, with $2,500 for each violation of the statute. MediaPost says the law was passed in 1988 when a newspaper obtained the rental history of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork.

What about you? Did Facebook tell all your friends that you rented Basic Instinct 2... again?

Blockbuster Sued For Participating In Facebook Beacon [MediaPost]

Buckling under a blistering poopy pile of ...

Ben Popken — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 18:12:46 EST

Buckling under a blistering poopy pile of criticism, Facebook will now let users turn off Beacon completely. [Facebook]

How To Block Facebook's Beacon

Ben Popken — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 20:22:32 EST

Don't like Facebook secretly tracking your online purchases and telling your friends what you bought? Users of the Firefox we browser can use an easy add-on that jams the beacon's signal. Just install the BlockSite add-on, and then add http://*facebook.com/beacon/* as one of the blocked sites. Make sure to keep those asterisks in. If that sounds a little complicated, this step-by-step walk-through at Wikihow shows you how it's done. Alternatively, you could also add the same url to AdBlockPlus, another Firefox extension.

How to Block Facebook Beacon [WikiHow]
PREVIOUSLY: Facebook Ruins Christmas?

Facebook Tries To Keep Founder's Private Papers Off Internet, Fails

Chris Walters — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 14:19:07 EST

In a funny twist of fate, last week Facebook failed in its attempt to force a site to remove incriminating and/or embarrassing personal information about Facebook's founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. We think Facebook missed a real opportunity here—they should have distributed the documents personally and attached ads to them.

What's even more bizarre is that the information that's now in the public eye had originally been sealed by court order during an earlier trial, and a reporter only got access to it through what appears to be an honest mistake by a records clerk. But now that it's out there, it's out there for good.

"[The reporter] said he had obtained the papers in mid-September from the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, which considered a part of the case, where a clerk apparently made a mistake and let him read and copy sealed documents, along with those that were still supposed to be open to the public.
"There were a whole bunch of manila envelopes taped shut, clearly sealed, and I did not open those," he said.

Some of the pages he copied were stamped "Confidential" or "Redacted." Bom Kim, founder and editor of 02138, which is not affiliated with the university or its alumni association, said that gave him pause.

"We cleared it with our lawyers," he said, who said that any order sealing the documents would apply only to the parties to the lawsuit. "We did wonder if they were under seal. But since we had obtained them legally, we got clearance."

Below is the list of documents that the reporter was able to locate while doing research for his article.

Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard Application
Mark Zuckerberg's email to Harvard's Administrative Board
Mark Zuckerberg's testimony #1
Mark Zuckerberg's testimony #2
Facebook Statement of cash flows 2005
Cameron and Tyler Winkelvoss's testimony
Mark Zuckerberg's online diary
Statement of damage done to La Jennifer sublet

Wow, lack of privacy sucks! It's too bad that it's so difficult to keep one's private documents (or online activities) out of the public eye. Oh well, la de dah.

"Poking Facebook" [02138]
"The Facebook Files" [02138]

RELATED
"The Diaries of Facebook's Founder" [Slate]
"Facebook Founder Finds He Wants Some Privacy" [New York Times]
(Photo: Associated Press)

List Of Companies That Participate In Facebook's Beacon Spy Program

Chris Walters — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 09:25:10 EST

One of our readers yesterday left a couple of interesting links in the comments section of our Beacon post. They provide the names of the companies that Facebook says are participating in its poorly conceived spy program Beacon. Here they are:

AllPosters.com
Blockbuster
Bluefly.com
Busted Tees
CBS Interactive (CBSSports.com & Dotspotter)
Citysearch
CollegeHumor
echomusic
ExpoTV
Gamefly
Hotwire
iWon
Joost
Kiva
Kongregate
LiveJournal
Live Nation
Mercantila
National Basketball Association
NYTimes.com
Overstock.com
Pronto.com
(RED)
Redlight
SeamlessWeb
Sony Online Entertainment LLC
Sony Pictures
STA Travel
The Knot
TripAdvisor
Travel Ticker
Travelocity
TypePad
viagogo
Vox
Yelp
WeddingChannel.com
Zappos.com

One site points out that Redlight is a mysterious addition—"I couldn't find any site that went by that name that wasn't an adult site." We found something called Redlight Poker—maybe that's the participating company?

[Updated to include missing companies—thanks Phantomfly!]

"Leading Websites Offer Facebook Beacon for Social Distribution" [Facebook] (Thanks to Gary!)

Facebook's Beacon Even Sneakier Than Originally Thought

Chris Walters — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 09:36:58 EST

Last week, Facebook made a lot of noise about how it was making its new Beacon spyware—we mean advertising initiative—less sneaky. But guess what? Over the weekend, Computer Associates reported that even after you've declined to have Beacon advertise your habits back to your friends, and even if you've logged out of Facebook, it will still surreptitiously report your actions back to Facebook's servers. And there's no way you can turn it off.

But Berteau's investigation reveals that Beacon is more intrusive and stealthy than anyone had imagined. In his note, titled "Facebook's Misrepresentation of Beacon's Threat to Privacy: Tracking users who opt out or are not logged in," he explains that he created an account on Conde Nast's food site Epicurious.com, a site participating in Beacon, and saved three recipes as favorites.
He saved the first recipe while logged in to Facebook, and he opted out of having it broadcast to his friends on Facebook. He saved the second recipe after closing the Facebook window, but without logging off from Epicurious or ending the browser session, and again declined broadcasting it to his friends. Then he logged out of Facebook and saved the third recipe. This time, no Facebook alert appeared asking if he wanted the information displayed to his friends.

After checking his network traffic logs, Berteau saw that in all three cases, information about his activities was reported back to Facebook, although not to his friends. That information included where he was on Epicurious, the action he had just taken and his Facebook account name.

It appears Facebook is blatantly misrepresenting what Beacon does at this point. Consider this quote from Chamath Palihapitiya, vice president of product marketing and operations at Facebook, when asked last week whether or not Facebook would still receive Beacon data if a user chose to opt out: "Absolutely not."

"Facebook's Beacon More Intrusive Than Previously Thought" [PCWorld]
(Photo: Getty)