MoveOn.org’s campaign against Facebook’s Beacon program is gathering momentum. The number of users who have joined MoveOn’s Facebook : stop invading my privacy group has been steadily increasing over the last few days. There are many blogs/sites as well which have come out in favor of MoveOn’s campaign.

Facebook’s Beacon is way for Facebook users to broadcast their activities like shopping on another site to their friends. The concept itself isn’t too bad, if it was given as an option to the users to opt-in. But the way Facebook has implemented it is that everyone’s in by default unless they want to opt-out, which does not sound right. Many users don’t read the fine prints and get trapped in it unexpectedly. The MoveOn’s campaign on Facebook has one such example : “Matt in New York already knows what his girlfriend got him for Christmas…“.

How can you ensure your information is not sent to Beacon?

One option is to opt-out of the Beacon using your privacy setting. However, it’s not clear if in that scenario Facebook doesn’t get the information about your activities on partner sites, or it receives the information but simply does not show it. So here is the brute force method that you can use to ensure that Facebook does not receive this information at all - if you use Firefox, install the block site plugin and block this url pattern: http://*facebook.com/beacon/*- this will make sure that any information being sent about your activity to Beacon is blocked by the browser.

Over the last few days Facebook has been in news for wrong reasons - it’s definitely not what they were expecting out of their new ad platform. They need to be cautious of their users’ privacy or else they may be well on their way to lose their users to other similar sites.

What’s your view on this controversy? Whose side would you take?