How does Beacon work?

If you are logged in to Facebook and visit a Beacon Affiliate, an action you take (like writing a review or purchasing an item), may trigger that website to want to publish a story to Facebook. Before that happens, the website will send some information to Facebook in order for Facebook to generate a notification that will display in the lower right corner of your screen. If you click "No, Thanks", no stories or information will be published anywhere on Facebook. Any information that was sent to Facebook's servers will be deleted. If you click "Close" or ignore the story, the story will be sent to Facebook, but not yet published.

The next time you visit your home page, you’ll see a message remind you that this story is being sent. There are three things you can do with this story—approve the story by clicking Okay, remove the story by clicking "Remove", or ignore the entire message by doing nothing. If you approve the story and click "Okay", the story will be published in your Wall and may appear in your friends' News Feeds. If you remove the story using the "Remove" link next to it, the story will never appear in your Wall or a friend’s News Feed. If you ignore the whole message, it will go away after a few days and nothing will be published to Wall or News Feed. However, when you ignore a story, it remains queued, so that the next time you generate a Beacon story, this home page message will have two stories, instead of one.

Once this story has been published, it will appear in your Wall, and may appear in the News Feeds of your friends.

You can control how Beacon interacts with your profile from the "Wall Permissions" tab of the Applications page.

Please note that behind the scenes, affiliate sites may send information to Facebook in order to determine if you are logged in or not. In these cases, information is not associated with your individual account, and Facebook deletes the data as well.