Via Mashable
Blogger, author and Facebook developer Jesse Stay today discovered that we may be seeing soon on Facebook a return to the dreaded Project Beacon (or as I have come to call it: Project Bac’n). In case you weren’t around the blogosphere or Facebook last Christmas, Project Beacon was a “revolutionary new initiative” by Facebook to help monetize their network.
The way it worked was that any activity you took part in on sites that had partnered up with Facebook on the Beacon initiative would automatically send your activity to Facebook. This would, in turn, create an entry on your News Feed that would advertise your activity to all your friends.
Bloggers, privacy advocates, and folks who didn’t want their Christmas surprises ruined threw a fit, and Facebook eventually made the options available for users to opt-out of Beacon. Shortly thereafter, Beacon participating sites either dropped out or phased out what activity ended up being sent to Facebook, and the whole nasty incident faded from our collective memory.
