Deconstructing Facebook Beacon JavaScript

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Deconstructing Facebook Beacon JavaScript
Via Simon Willison: "How Facebook's new Beacon service (also known as 'Facebook ruined Christmas') actually works." You want to read this article - the first part of it, at least - in order to understand what the furor is about. Basically, "you create a Page for your brand or product, advertise it through Social Ads to a very targeted market, learn about your success through Insights, and connect to your off-Facebook (off-Book?) service via Beacon." The applications turn Facebook into a giant tracking, advertising and sales engine, which is why its worth $15 billion. The latter part of the article gives some practical advice for consumers and then turns to a very detailed analysis of the Javascript code. The key bit of advice: "don't leave yourself logged into Facebook." More...