The law of unintended consequences: I find myself avoiding Overstock.com (advertisers take note) because of the Facebook Beacon ads, even though I'm entirely passive at Facebook, just watching it, never inviting anyone.

(Added later: I accept invitations from people I have connected with, on line or off. But some people I don't know have asked me to be their friend; perhaps which just baffles me. Perhaps that is in our future. These invites don't seem to expire.)

No one on my Christmas list is a "friend." I just find it creepy that my activity on the web is tracked and published without my consent.

Earlier in the month, Download Squad and other sites passed on Nate Weiner's (The Idea Shower) discovery of a way to block the ads. This should be better known outside deep geek circles:

How to block Facebook Beacon - Download Squad

Fortunately Nate Weiner figured out an extraordinarily simple solution (for Firefox users). Just install the BlockSite Firefox add-on and block Facebook Beacon.

The steps:

1. Get Firefox
2. Download and Install the BlockSite plugin for Firefox.
3. After restarting Firefox select ‘Add-ons’ from the Tools menu.
4. Click the ‘Options’ button on the BlockSite extension
5. Click the ‘Add’ button
6. Enter http://*facebook.com/beacon/* into the input box
7. Click ‘OK’
8. Click ‘OK’ again and you are good to go.

The principle:

If you look at the javascript that is used to make requests to Facebook, you will see that the requests are made to http://www.facebook.com/beacon/beacon.js.php so by blocking just the beacon folder, you are preventing the site from sending requests to Facebook without blocking the rest of Facebook.

By using the asterisk in the URL you block variations with and without the "www."

Here's what happened to Nate that started all this: Block Facebook Beacon

While he played at online game site Kongregate, Nate found this popping into his Facebook profile:

Kongregate CEO Jim Greer wrote the first comment on this post:

Hi Nate -

I understand how you feel about this - we’re going to add an account setting for Kongregate to ‘never show’ the Facebook beacon. If this is checked we won’t make the javascript call and Facebook won’t get any data.

- Jim Greer
CEO, Kongregate

Comments on both sites are interesting and worth a look.