Remember the brouhaha over FaceBook’s invasive advertising scheme Beacon? Christmas surprises were ruined. Strange video rental proclivities were exposed. People were angry as they saw their surfing and shopping patterns emerge on their FaceBook profiles. Well, it’s back.

Possibly more accurately, it never really left. It seems sites like Fandango has continued to use Beacon even after the huge uproar over it happened, the issue just faded from the blogosphere. FaceBook has stated in response to the reawakened awareness of Beacon’s use that it is not accepting new Beacon users, but there are still plenty active in the program from before.

It’s too bad that FaceBook didn’t do a better job of introducing Beacon, and offer better ways to control privacy settings form the start. A simple write up before the launch way back when and an interface that required users to opt-in if they wanted to use it would have solved the problem (well, most of it).

Why do I say it’s too bad? Because Beacon is actually a really useful and efficient tool if used correctly, and they could have been using it to expand how FaceBook is used as an aggregator and life streamer in competition with FriendFeed and others this whole time. Instead they have spent past months pulling damage control duty.

According to Jesse Stay, Beacon is alive and well on sites like CBSSports Fantasy Football (this has since been confirmed by FaceBook). When one of the windows pops up you will have a short window of time to turn off or decline the individual offer to share the info with your friends via your mini feed. What do you do if you miss your chance and the window goes away?

If you lose the window of opportunity for saying no, you can simply disable Beacon across the board in FaceBook. simply go to your privacy settings and look for the Disable Beacon under Beacon Settings. It should look like this:

Once you toggle the switch off you shouldn’t get anymore queries on behalf of Beacon users. I’ve had mine off for a while now and if I hadn’t seen this article pop up on Twitter and then FriendFeed I’d never have known Beacon had resurfaced.

Related:

Entry was posted on Saturday, September 20th, 2008 at 12:53 am under Advertising, Social Media.

Read more entries by Leslie Poston.
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