Source:
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press.NEW YORK — Facebook is closing an uncomfortable chapter in its five-year history.
The social network says it will shut down Beacon, a program that tracks users' activities on other Web sites. When it launched in 2007, Beacon was immediately attacked by users as a privacy violation.
It tracked purchases Facebook users made on other sites and sent alerts about them to their Facebook friends. Facebook later let users turn Beacon off, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg publicly apologized for it.
Beacon never really caught on, and Facebook agreed to end it as part of a class-action lawsuit settlement.
The Palo Alto, California-based Facebook company will also pay $9.5 million to create a foundation to promote online privacy, safety and security.
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I knew I was not just paranoid about that networking site.
My daughter was despondent earlier - I asked her what the problem was and she told me that Facebook was running slow and down sometimes.
I assume it is due to their trying to pull all this code out of their systems.