

Facebook's Beacon More Intrusive Than Previously Thought - garbowza
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140182-c,onlineprivacy/article.html

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Tichy
I don't know exactly how Beacon works, but here is a rough guess to explain
what happened to the author of that article: presumably if you connect to a
partnering service, some kind of negotiation takes place to let that service
know your Facebook id and wish to log your activities. Not sure if it involves
a direct communication between Facebook and partnering site, but I suppose it
does (if internet security mechanisms work as they should, there should be no
other way).

So now if user logs off from Facebook, partnering site doesn't know about that
- how would it? Logging off from Facebook has nothing do with partnering site.
Hence partnering site keeps sending information to Facebook.

Measures could be taken by Beacon to avoid that, but not straightforward.

I would expect that if the user deletes all cookies etc and reconnects to
partnering site, no information will be sent to Facebook.

Nevertheless, I think many other sites could easily employ something like
beacon, without telling the users. I always assumed that lot's of web sites
already do that (connected via the ad networks).

