Facebook, the insidious social networking site, has implemented a new “advertising” service which it calls Beacon. Beacon allows you to “enable your customers to share the actions they take on your website with their Facebook friends,” whatever that means.

Facebook’s website states that “user privacy is extremely important to Facebook. We designed Facebook Beacon to enable effortless sharing, but we’ve also put in features to protect user privacy.”

Well, that’s what they say. I say, “bollocks.”

Facebook was forced to admit at the weekend that Beacon has the ability to monitor logged-off users’ activities and send the data back to them.

Users aren’t informed that data on their activities at these sites is flowing back to Facebook, nor given the option to block that information from being transmitted, according to Stefan Berteau, senior research engineer at CA’s Threat Research Group, who discovered the risk.

Which is all very ironic, since last Friday, Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, failed in a court bid to gag a magazine that published data including drunken extracts from his college diary and his social security number. This data, naturally, has ended up on the Internet, and poor old Mark doesn’t like the taste of his own medicine. Shame.