When I was writing about how “average” Facebookers might not like how the new Social Ads might be implemented, in the back of my mind I was wondering how “above-average” Facebookers might take to it.  Geeky coding types being stereotypically zealous about their privacy, I presumed that someone, somewhere, would probably create a software solution to the problem.

Something like “Adblocker” for Firefox.

And lo-and behold, from my nascent brain farts to the Geek Cloud in the sky!

Just as a reminder, Facebook’s social advertising mechanism allows advertising partners to embed some Javascript (and more, I presume) on their websites, so that if someone who uses Facebook does something — i.e. purchase something, play something, save something, mark something — that site will message back to Facebook to all of that person’s friends that *something* happened.

As Om Malik noted, while you can choose how these messages should choose to be sent — that is, you can opt out of this by changing privacy settings — we’ve no guarantee that the information isn’t sent back to Facebook *anyway*, and kept on metaphorical file.  The best and most transparent way that this *should* be done is if someone puts the kibosh on *all* messages being sent back, Facebook ought *not* to get *any* information … not simply be given the instruction not to *publish* it in your news ticker.

Back to the solution at hand.

What you can do is download a Firefox extension called the “BlockSite Plugin“, which you can set to block Facebook’s Beacon specifically; what will happen is that the extension will block any Javascript calls from the Facebook Beacon URL and *presto*, your activities are *truly* secure.

The details can be found over here.

Personally, I love solutions like this because it really puts things back into the hands of the user.

Now, what I’d love to see is the ability for end users to block out social ads completely — that is, receive advertising notes from their “friends” — which is something people cannot yet opt out of.  On the surface of things it does seem tremendously more complicated, but I’m sure someone somewhere is thinking of a solution.

After all, there’s a whole lot of fame and notoriety for the person that does. ;)

tip: digg