MoveOn launched an online petition on its own website and on that of Facebooks against Facebook’s “Beacon” advertisements.

Beacon is an advertising platform that tracks member transactions on third-party partner sites and transforms them into product/service endorsements. The endorsements are then inserted their friends’ “news feeds.”

Beacon currently has 44 participants, including Fandango, eBay, LiveJournal, and Blockbuster so if you are a Facebook member and if you have bought, auctioned or rented an item on these sites, everyone in your list will be notified in a matter of seconds.

Of course Facebook members are automatically opted-in to the program and they are able to opt out but only on case-by-case basis. That means that for example you must opt-out for each of the 44 participants, but take a minute to imagine how much time you’ll spend opting-out for, let’s say, 200 sites.

In its online petition MoveOn called Facebook’s Beacon “a huge invasion of privacy”.

Also MoveOn.org claims that instead of giving its users the option to opt-out Facebbook should give members the possibility to opt-in.

"Facebook says its users can 'opt out' of having their private purchases reported to all their friends. But that option is easily missed," according to MoveOn. "And even if you do 'opt out' for purchases on one site, it doesn't apply to purchases on another site—you have to keep opting out over and over again."

In response to MoveOn’s actions, Facebook issued a statement saying MoveOn "misrepresents how Facebook Beacon works". "Information is shared with a small selection of a user's trusted network of friends, not publicly on the Web or with all Facebook users."

Facebook’s Beacon is part of the ad platform unveiled this month, which platform allows the companies to build their own pages on Facebook for connecting with the consumers they target, spread their marketing messages and to gather insight information into the users’ activity on Facebook.

In fact, there are already ad-systems that work in a similar way to Facebook’s ad platform. The so-called behaviorally targeted ads use cookies for anonymously monitor and track the web sites that the users have visited. Then the behavioral ad networks will then send those users the specific ads in which they are most likely to be interested in based on the sites the user has visited.

The behavioral targeting market is set to increase to $3.8 billion by 2011, according to analysts.