For weeks now there has been controversy surrounding Facebook’s new Beacon ad service. Many people have felt that it is a breach into their privacy and have been trying to find ways to shut the program down for good. Throughout all this Facebook has stated several times that there is nothing wrong with their service and that they take precautions to make sure that their users’ privacy is protected. But now they are singing a different tune.
After much investigation a CA security researcher has discovered that the Beacon ad service will track users whether they are logged into their Facebook accounts or not. No longer able to hide behind anything – Facebook has finally come out and admitted that there might be a few things that they were hiding from people.
Facebook has stated that the privacy settings that were instilled – which ask the person to either refuse or decline using Beacon – weren’t working the way they should have been. Even if they had declined the service they were still being tracked – as were their friends.
They have also stated that all of the data that is collected from the Beacon service is usually deleted and transmitted back to its own server. Whether or not this will help their case has not been determined. Apparently this information about Facebook came after they had appeased some people by fixing some of the previous problems that they had with the Beacon service. Facebook may have to look into shutting down the whole project for good or else starting from scratch.
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