With Facebook making changes to its Beacon program, users will see a new set of options every time they interact with a “Beacon Affiliate”. This is what you’ll see:
Notification
Facebook users will see a notification in the lower right corner of the screen after transacting with a Beacon Affiliate. Options include “No Thanks” that will immediately stop the transaction from being published. Alternatively closing or ignoring the warning won’t immediately publish the story, but it will be put in a queue
Second Warning
Presuming you’ve ignored or closed the first notification, Facebook warns users again the next time they visit their home page. A new box reminds you that an activity has been sent to Facebook. Like the first notification you can choose to not publish the activity by hitting remove, or you can choose to publish it by hitting ok.
Per the original statement from Facebook at this stage, presuming you’ve ignored the warnings and not selected to publish the activity or told Facebook no, it won’t be published. Here’s the kicker though: they’ll keep annoying you until you finally make a decision:
If a user does nothing with the initial notification on Facebook, it will hide after some duration without a story being published. When a user takes a future action on a Beacon site, it will reappear and display all the potential stories along with the opportunity to click “OK” to publish or click “remove” to not publish.
But there is hope should you not wish to have your Facebook experience consumed by messages asking you to publish or not publish an activity, you can opt out permanently
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Opt Out
Found via the “External Websites” section of the Facebook Privacy page, this allows users to permanently opt in or out of Beacon notifications, or if you’re not sure be notified. The downside is that there is no global option to opt out of every Beacon affiliated program; it has to be set per program. Better this than nothing I suppose.
Update: second screen shot is updated. Thanks to Facebook for the more up to date shot.
