Facebook Beacon Blocker
Facebook Beacon is part of Facebook's advertising efforts. It is basically a cooperation with 44 partner sites who execute JavaScript code on their website sending specific user information to Facebook. Examples would be the popular gaming portal Kongegrate which send information about played games to Facebook, movie reviews published at Fandango or purchases made on eBay. User identification is done by the JavaScript code and a Facebook cookie.
Facebook Beacon has been heavily criticized by privacy advocates since its introduction. The main point of criticism is that users cannot opt out completely. While they can prevent that information from the 44 partner sites will be published publicly and accessible by friends they cannot prevent Facebook from receiving the data in first place. There is no opt out of the system other than blocking the scripts from being executed.
Facebook Beacon Blocker is a Firefox add-on that will block the Facebook Beacon service from collecting and sending information about the user to Facebook. It basically blocks the script from being executed on the partner sites which is all it takes to turn the service off completely.
Users with Firefox add-ons like NoScript can also prevent that the Facebook Beacon script will be executed by simply keeping it disabled in the options.
Here is the list of websites and companies that utilize the Facebook Beacon service:
- AllPosters.com
- Campusfood.com
- Blockbuster
- Bluefly.com
- CBS Interactive (CBSSports.com & Dotspotter)
- eBay
- Epicurious
- ExpoTV
- Fandango
- Gamefly
- Hotwire
- a number of IAC brands, including: CollegeHumor, Busted Tees, IWon, Citysearch, Pronto.com and echomusic
- Joost
- Kiva
- Kongregate
- LiveJournal
- Live Nation
- Mercantila
- National Basketball Association
- NYTimes.com
- Overstock.com
- (RED)
- Redlight
- SeamlessWeb
- Sony Online Entertainment LLC
- Sony Pictures
- STA Travel
- The Knot
- Travelocity
- Travel Ticker
- TripAdvisor
- TypePad
- viagogo
- Vox
- WeddingChannel.com
- Yelp
- Zappos.com
Lots of popular sites that use the service. Might be time to block the Facebook Beacon service if you use any of those listed above.
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thanks you saved my 1000 tabs :)
Fantastic! Thank you! This worked like a charm. Had exactly the same issue in Firefox on a PC and this fixed it.
Thank you for sharing this! Like you, I’d noticed that disabling/re-enabling the extension would work for that browser session, but I hadn’t tried anything yet to force a fix. I’m SO glad it was this easy!
I sure hope the OneTab team issues an official fix ASAP, though. Now that it’s been a few days, they’re starting to get bad reviews, which is unfortunate.
Yes! I also tried the workaround. I also reported this bug to OneTab team on the first day I faced this issue.
Thanks, Ashwin for the fix!
I was nearing desperation when I found your direction. It worked.
Thank you so much.
Hi, OneTab developer here. Sorry for this – it’s not clear why this bug is suddenly happening for some people, but we’re urgently investigating this with the Mozilla/Firefox team and will be providing a fix very shortly.
Thank you so much for sharing this fix! You saved my tabs. The only note/point I would like to add is for Step 2.
Perhaps put a note stating they should copy Step 3 and forward of your tutorial to Word. Once we close Firefox, we lose visibility to your tutorial. For me, I know I would not be able to remember the .bkp.
Again, thank you!
Easy temporary fix: To make OneTab work again, type “about:addons” in your Firefox address bar. Then find OneTab in the list of extensions, and click the blue toggle button twice. This will disable and then re-enable OneTab, and cause it to work again.
We’re working with Mozilla for a permanent fix. Sorry for the inconvenience, this is a very strange issue that is only affecting the Firefox version of OneTab.
I have found by disabling and then re-enable in the add on menu I get my tab back. Short term fix. Will try yours.
Thank you. I thought I had lost a month of digging. I’ll be a little more attentive about exporting the urls from the extension list now. It’s a great tool but Firefox doesn’t always play nice with its extensions.
Good news – I’ve been working with Mozilla all morning to resolve this. Mozilla have confirmed it was due to a bug in Firefox (related to extension permissions downgrades).
To fix OneTab, just go to “about:addons” in your Firefox address bar, click the ‘cog’ icon in the top right, and click ‘Check for updates’. This will upgrade you to OneTab v1.39, which fixes the issue.
Darn, I tried everything here and I still can’t get my tabs back. I even did a full system restore to a point last week hoping that my saved tabs would be in the old .xpi file, but no luck.
I’m pretty disappointed :(
Probably I should’ve been more patient, but now I don’t know how to feel about this. I lost about 900 tabs in the recovery process (I reinstalled OneTab), which, incredible as it sounds, weren’t all just a messy dump I’m never going back to, but actually important stuff (yeah, I have a peculiar workflow).
Trying to suppress the anger and reflecting on what happened, it seems I should blame myself for not having a backup. But surely I couldn’t back it up manually every time I save a tab, it would defy all purpose of having this addon in the first place. A couple of years ago data was stored at “~/.mozilla/firefox/%PROFILE%/jetpack/[email protected]/simple-storage”, and you could back it up with simple crontab. This is no longer the case, this folder is just empty. And since OneTab is closed-source black box, I couldn’t have done anything else as well.
So the only reasonable lesson to be learned is that I actually must stop relying on OneTab, since sooner or later it will let me down again. Fuck it.
I just disable and re-enable. No tabs lost!
I switched from OneTab to Tab Stash (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-stash/) months ago and haven’t looked back. I had never experienced any data loss with OneTab, although I was a bit concerned by some reports of data loss I read about. My main issue was with OneTabs performance, it’s a hog. I had been looking for a replacement and testing out a ton of addons for a couple of months when I finally discovered Tab Stash, and am damn glad I did. I really can’t recommend it strongly enough…
Thanks, bsdaddict. Never tried it, looks nice, but I’m a bit concerned by small number of stashed tabs on these screenshots, not sure if it’d be usable when stashing a lot of tabs. How many tabs do you usually have stashed?
Tab Stash is is a great alternative to One Tab, y’all… I made the switch months ago and am very happy with it.
>DO THIS FIRST: Before trying the following fix, I recommend disabling OneTab and re-enabling it from the about:addons page, to access and regain your tabs.
Worked for me! Many, many thanks!
I know it’s late but ist there an option for chrome on android tablets aswell? My wife hates it that the search bar and Tab list will just come Up again when she Scrolls up
You are truly a hero and a scholar, sir or madam. I salute you!