So, this new Facebook Bacon thingummy. A way of pinging weblog aggregators? A mechanism for delivering cooked cured ham to your computer? No, and no.
In fact, to the surprise of almost no-one, it's yet another advertising mechanism. This one promotes Six Apart to Facebook customers, and allows Facebook to snoop on what other sites its customers are using. Om Malik describes the process, which we shall preçis.
These partner sites put a little a piece of Facebook javascript on their web site and certain information is sent to Facebook. For instance, Livejournal customers can publish information about their new post, which then appears in the infoblurb sent to their friend.
Here's the rub: even if the customer declines to publish the information to their contacts, it's still sent to Facebook, and (we must presume) added to their computer-stored profile. This is qualitatively different from last year's privacy flap which exposed data that customers believed was private. This new idea allows Facebook to collect data even if people don't publish it. We have been unable to review the company's privacy policy to determine if this behaviour is consistent with the published statements.
Addition: 9 November It turns out that there's a simple way to block this privacy-invading communication. Add facebook.com/beacon to your Adblock lists. Vwoosh! Not only do Facebook's customers stop being spammed with messages like Blah-blah sold herself down the river, but Facebook's computers don't even know where you've been. The methods listed below will still work, but we deem them superceded. Original research by Idea Shower. Addition ends.
Further addition: 11 December Another way to make this sort of thing fail miserably is to employ a completely different browser for Facebook and nothing else. Lynx appears to choke the server, but K-meleon should do the trick. Oh, and users can now stop things appearing, but the information is still sent to their profile. The next sentence stands.
Of course, Facebook users cannot directly opt out of this mechanism. They can do one of two things to break it faster than a china plate:
1) Disable Javascript. Facebook, having being programmed by cretins who don't understand HTML or accessibility, does everything through Javascript. Ditch the JS and it can't see you.
2) Ensure that all Facebook cookies are session-only. When leaving Facebook for the moment, logout, and close and re-start the browser.
Neither of these is a customer-friendly thing to do.
Other commentators have suggested that Facebook proposed a revision to its term of service yesterday: the bulk of comment leads us to believe that this had more to do with the introduction of fake pages for companies than anything else. We have been completely unable to verify this, as Facebook refuses to serve pages to our browser. This appears to be because we fake our browser string to be Lynx. Again, we refer readers to remarks about the cretins who programmed the site.
Are these the actions of a privacy-loving company? Or one that is in pursuit of the almighty* dollar. (Now 10% less mighty than it was six months ago.) It really does remind us of our favourite bogeyman, G****e. (See arguments passim ad nauseam.)
Back in June, we argued that Facebook carried the seeds of its own destruction, and that eventually customers would resent being treated as commodities to be bought and sold. With this latest idea, Facebook has lost a bit of its cool.
