Facebook Beacon a privacy risk to everyone. Dare Obasanjo's post on Facebook Beacon explains how Facebook's clumsy attempt to monetize its users' information and activities invades and tramples over people's privacy rights.

Facebook Beacon is a technology that links Facebook with other web sites. It allows things that you do on other web sites (like buying items, downloading files, watching a movie..., anything, really) to be pushed to your Facebook profile for all your friends to see. For example:

Jenny just bought the book "Vengance: How to quit your job and get back at them" on ZZZBooks.com

When Jenny buys the book, she does get an opportunity to opt-out in the form of a popup window asking her if she wants this information to be fed to Facebook. Once the site (in this fictitious case, ZZZBooks.com) attempts to send data to her FB profile, she will be able to go into her privacy settings in FB and opt-out of all future communications from the site (ZZZBooks.com). While having the opt-out is a good thing, ideally there would be an option for us to go in and opt-out of all communications from all sites, but since that isn't in Facebook's interest, the option isn't there.

[x] Do not allow any external web sites to send information to my profile.

Another problem with Beacon is that it is not only information on Facebook users that is sent to Facebook. When a site joins the Facebook program, they add code to their own site that traps the relevant events, gathers the necessary user data, and sends that off to Facebook.com to be processed. It does this for every visitor to the site, even if they don't have an account on Facebook! Nasty.

I won't bother going into more details (Dare's post does a good job). The short version is that Facebook's Beacon program is a huge privacy risk for everyone, not just Facebook users.

I would advise taking a look at these instructions on how to block Beacon.

I also hope that Facebook and the companies involved in the Beacon program suffer a backlash because of this poorly designed and executed attempt to make money off of us.