Block Facebook Beacon

Written by Nate Weiner

So here I am, burning some brain cells and taking some time to relax playing a game on Kongregate, when a little window pops up in the corner of my screen and says “Kongregate is sending this to your Facebook profile: Nate played Desktop Tower Defense 1.5 at Kongregate.” Which immediately elicited a “Hellll no” from my mouth.

Maybe what shocked me was the way it was worded, essentially saying that Kongregate was sending the data without even asking my permission (even though there is a ‘No Thanks’ button in the corner) but needless to say, I was not too thrilled about my surfing habits showing up on my Facebook profile.

So I clicked ‘No Thanks’, and hopped over to Facebook and looked at the privacy settings for this new program. And found they give you the options of choosing ‘allow’, ‘notify me’, or ‘never’.

The problem however is, that even though you can choose whether or not it is made public that you visited these sites, Facebook still has the data regardless of your privacy settings. Now I don’t mean to sound like I’m tin-foil-hat-wearing paranoid, but that does seem to encroach a little past what Facebook’s role in my life should be.

I want Facebook to sit still and let me check out how many of my friends enjoy the movie Sleepover and look at pictures of people I didn’t like in High School. I don’t need Facebook extrapolating data about me as I go about my business on the web.

For those of you that don’t know, this is part of Facebook’s new advertising platform. Don’t get me wrong, I actually think Facebook’s new Beacon system is a great idea and a powerful tool for online advertisers. It is a great way to allow users to add more about their lives to their profiles. Unfortunately, it’s being done in a ‘you can opt-out’ manner, when it should be ‘you can opt-in’.

As this gets rolled out to more and more sites, the potential for this being taken advantage of is pretty high. Because each site in the program will send requests to Facebook each time you arrive, which in-turn would allow Facebook to catalog a good chunk of the sites that you are surfing.

So the easiest thing to do is just block it. I peaked at the javascript that controls the communication between the used site and Facebook and see that it’s quite easy to prevent the communication. (This assumes you use Firefox. If you don’t, just look around for ways to block specific pages in your browser):

  1. Get Firefox
  2. Download and Install the BlockSite plugin for Firefox.
  3. After restarting Firefox select ‘Add-ons’ from the Tools menu.
  4. Click the ‘Options’ button on the BlockSite extension
  5. Click the ‘Add’ button
  6. Enter http://*facebook.com/beacon/* into the input box
  7. Click ‘OK’
  8. Click ‘OK’ again and you are good to go.

If you look at the javascript that is used to make requests to Facebook, you will see that the requests are made to http://www.facebook.com/beacon/beacon.js.php so by blocking just the beacon folder, you are preventing the site from sending requests to Facebook without blocking the rest of Facebook.

Update: As someone anonymously noted below, you should block both facebook.com and www.facebook.com, you can do that by replacing ‘www.’ with the wildcard character ‘*’ (see step 5 updated above)

37 thoughts on “Block Facebook Beacon”

  3. rolli

    is there a way to do something similar in (the dreaded) IE?
    I can’t install Firefox on my work laptop, so I’m forced to use IE, and use it for weekend browsing (including facebook) as well.

  4. fluffman

    I like the no script extension instead. It blocks ALL harmful JS, unless I specifically allow it. And it’s super easy to allow, too, or just allow temporarily, or whatever.

  5. meh

    “Now I don?t mean to sound like I?m tin-foil-hat-wearing paranoid, but that does seem to encroach a little past what Facebook?s role in my life should be.”

    When it comes to marketting, there is no such thing as tin-foil-hat paranoid. If you can think of something that could be done with info about you to try to sell you shit you don’t need, then the marketers will try it sooner or later.

    I have a few firefox extensions, and have them set up agressively for privacy.
    NoScript – No javascript works at all, unless I specifically allow a site.
    Adblock – with a lot of filters. I use this to also kill some JS when I need to allow a site to use JS. Quite a lot of sites use javascript for tracking, but if you need JS for fuctionality of the site, then adblock can kill things like hbx.js and urchin.js whilst the rest of the JS should work.
    FoxyProxy – Gives the ability to send browsing via proxies based on regexp rules. I use it to send my Googling through TOR. To deal with Google I use customizegoogle too, to remove the adverts and tracking.
    Refcontrol – I use this to forge all referers to be the root of a site. This way, when surfing to a site from a search engine, the site doesn’t find out what you searched for (or where you came from at all).
    And finally I use a cookie management extension. Browsers, for years, have had an option called block third party cookies, and I have never seen a site when blocking third party cookies has harmed functionality. This option recently vanished from FF, so I use an extension to apply my policy, and to block cookies from some sites. I also have FF clear all cookies apart from a few when the browser is closed. This will kill tracking across browsing sessions.

    And Rolli, there’s a version of FF distributed in a .zip file. You can just unzip that somewhere (like your desktop) and run it. There is also something called portable firefox that I think is designed to run FF from a USB stick.

  6. sdf

    @ Chris:
    peeked: past tense of peek (to look at) correct usage for this article
    peaked: past tense of peak (to pinnacle) incorrect usage

  7. tuntex

    I think the reason why this was triggered was due to the fact that people add “friends” that they dislike.
    Just today, facebook added a new option on “News Feed”. It allows you to chose whether you like or dislike every news that pops up in your list.
    I think facebook’s goal from this new option (that was created right after the trouble made by Beacon) is to track who are not really your friends.

  8. Rob Lee

    Excellent post. My Blockbuster account does the same thing with Facebook. Annoying. Thanks for the info.

  12. James_Smith

    What this really shows is that Facebook fully intends to record all the information about you that it can and likely use it for profit.

    It also shows that anyone on Facebook is an idiot for being there. I wouldn't be on that or any other “Social networking” site if they paid me. But then, I'm old enough not to be a stupid jerk like Facebook fans.

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