The social networking website, Facebook has apologized and changed its tune regarding its controversial Beacon advertising system. The Beacon system is a vital element of the advertising platform of that social networking website. The original intention of the Beacon system was to provide Facebook members with the ability to capture and share information quickly and simply, just as they do (for money) on other websites and with other web services.

Obviously, this information – contact and demographic information regarding Facebook users – is quite desirable to advertisers. Facebook originally used the Beacon system in an automatic way. This meant that Beacon was fully active by default – and therefore always shared information among Facebook users. Many people protested Beacon because it was inclined to spoil many surprises regarding privately discussed information among friends, such as spoiling birthday gifts and surprise parties and other such information. Due to the privacy implications of Beacon, it freely shared the information among Facebook users as well as with Facebook itself, so that some information – potentially quite private information – was being shared without any way to prevent it.

Finally, after quite some time, Facebook finally created a way to opt out of Beacon and its information sharing and allowing users to choose whether or not they will share information with another Facebook user, having to give their approval for any Beacon-related actions. However, Facebook still did not offer a way for its users to simply opt-out altogether from the Beacon system.

However, now it is possible to opt out of the Beacon system altogether and give their information the highest possible level of protection, and the greatest degree of control over the sharing of their information.

The instructions to opt-out of Beacon are located in the “External Websites” portion of Facebook’s Privacy Policy page. So from the homepage:

1) Sign in
2) Click “privacy” in the upper right-hand corner
3) Read directions and fill the page out as you wish.

By following these instructions, you will be able to permanently opt out of all Beacon notifications, or choose to be notified of each and every Beacon action offer. Indeed, there is no option to opt out of every Beacon-affiliated program on a universal level. They must be opted-out on a per-program basis. However, at least the option is now available to you.

If your information has already been sold to direct marketers or telemarketers (whether thru facebook or not), and you need to find the source owner of a phone call you can check out this website.