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Doctor Four
My other vehicle is a TARDIS
Premium Member
join:2000-09-05
Dallas, TX

Doctor Four

Premium Member

Facebook's Beacon also tracks non-Facebook users

It would appear that the privacy concerns of Facebook's
Beacon tracking service on third party sites is well
founded: they also track non users or those who
have cancelled their accounts:

»www.pcworld.com/article/ ··· cle.html

It's this kind of behavior that's going to get Facebook
in peoples' hosts files, or at least the URL of their
Beacon tracking service. Either that or marking it an
untrusted script in NoScript (for those who use Firefox.)

EGeezer
Premium Member
join:2002-08-04
Midwest

EGeezer

Premium Member

A linked article provides instructions on how to block the process using Firefox's BlockSite extension.

See here for the CA blog story. The author has several suggestions. one is a technical solution;
... Just download the plugin and add ht tp://www.facebook.com/beacon/* (remove the space) and facebook.com/beacon/* under ‘options’ to the ‘add’ section and restart your browser. ...
FF extension is here.

angussf
Premium Member
join:2002-01-11
Tucson, AZ

angussf

Premium Member

Adblock Plus »addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1865 also works, no need to add BlockSite if you have it.
ihaddsl
join:2001-12-05
/dev/hda0

ihaddsl to Doctor Four

Member

to Doctor Four
looks like the firefox extension NoScript will also disable the tracking by default.

EGeezer
Premium Member
join:2002-08-04
Midwest

1 edit

1 recommendation

EGeezer to angussf

Premium Member

to angussf
said by angussf:

Adblock Plus »addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1865 also works, no need to add BlockSite if you have it.
That's what I was wondering - the article said that AdBlock Plus has dropped site blocking capability. this brings up a question;

I know AdBlock will filter inbound connections from filtered sites. however, does using AdBlock filter rules prevent outbound connections from the PC to the blocked site, or just inbound from the filtered site - or does it block traffic in both directions?

If the filters don't block outbound, the Facebook spy data could still be sent from the PC to the folder.

EDIT - a quick packet capture shows that when I rely on AdBlocker filters, I still get outbound request to Facebook and a Facebook 404 reply is delivered to my browser. However, when I use BlockSite filters, the request to the URLs never get past the blocker and nothing shows up in the capture.

I conclude that outbound connections can be made to the URLs despite AdBlock filters, but BlockSite filters will stop them beofre the browser can even send the request.