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Facebook Under Fire for Spyware Ad System

by Tim Stevens on December 5, 2007 at 09:53 AM

Facebook Under Fire for Ad Tracking SystemLast month, when Facebook announced a series of ads that would inject themselves into your friends' News Feeds, privacy advocates balked. It was believed that this sort of implied advertising that appeared to come from a friend was illegally using their likeness to shill for some product or another. All that seems minor now, however, compared to new reports that Facebook is actually tracking user's web surfing habits, even when they're signed off from the site.

Beacon, the company's name for their new advertising system, tracks Facebook users' habits across over 40 sites who have signed up with the company, broadcasting things like movie ticket purchases and video rentals to friends in the News Feed section of the site. Once you have clicked "Remember Me" when logging into Facebook, the site will track your every move, despite Facebook executives earlier indicating that this sort of tracking was not in place.

This raises a lot of privacy concerns. You can go to the External Applications section of your Facebook preferences page and disable these updates from showing on your Feed, but by default you've already opted in to letting your friends see whatever you rent. And, even if you turn them off, there's little doubt that your rental and ticket purchasing history is still being sent to Facebook, and who knows what they're doing with it. It's all a little disconcerting, and given a choice between MySpace's constant inundation of spam and bugs and Facebook's creepy advertising schemes, we're tempted to downgrade back to Web 1.0.

From Yahoo! News

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Tags: AdWare, Facebook, MySpace, Privacy

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