Tyler’s Weblog

So yet another reason to stay off social networking sites has sprung up, this time dealing with Facebook’s key advertising platform known as “Beacon.” It turns out that Beacon can track users’ activities even when they are not logged in. Beacon was intended to track certain activities of users on certain sites and would report the activities to the user’s friends. Users had the option of not being tracked or reported on their activities. It just so happens that now Beacon is tracking and reporting activities whether the user is logged in or not and whether they like it or not. Beacon has been under criticism lately by several groups and this new finding won’t help its case. If a user checks the “Remember Me” box in order to keep from logging in every time, they are at risk of being watched every time they surf the internet.

I have never enjoyed putting much personal information online. Personally, the less people know about me and my activities, the better. This kind of stuff is happening more and more, there is spyware and hacking can be done in seconds. Is anything safe? How do I know that if I decide to purchase movie tickets from Fandango, my credit card information isn’t being saved and distributed to all of my friends, or even worse, people who don’t know me at all. As an advertising major, I have to think that this can’t be helping the business of online and interactive advertising. With so many people suffering from identity theft, and so many more reasons of why not to trust the internet arising, how difficult is it going to be to convince people to go out and get a product from the internet. It doesn’t matter how high tech a company is, if it can’t keep the trust of it’s customers, then it will crumble in a relatively short time. Technology has never been the most trustworthy tool, and I can safely assume that this incident didn’t help at all.