Facebook’s Project Beacon

Beacon is the internal project name at Facebook around an effort to work with third parties and gain access to very specific user data. An example may be a purchase of a book or DVD from Amazon. Under Beacon, the fact of that purchase will be sent to Facebook and automatically included in the user’s News Feed.

At the point of sale on the third party site, the user will see a “toast” popup asking them if they approve the sale information being included in their Facebook News Feed.

If Facebook does roll out this feature, there is absolutely no way I will participate in this. Privacy advocates are going to have a field day.