a little facebook safety warning (and solution)

http://www.ideashower.com/blog/block-facebook-beacon/

Block Facebook Beacon
Nate Weiner November 7th, 2007
158 Comments

So here I am, burning some brain cells and taking some time to relax playing a game on Kongregate, when a little window pops up in the corner of my screen and says “Kongregate is sending this to your Facebook profile: Nate played Desktop Tower Defense 1.5 at Kongregate.” Which immediately elicited a “Hellll no” from my mouth.

Maybe what shocked me was the way it was worded, essentially saying that Kongregate was sending the data without even asking my permission (even though there is a ‘No Thanks’ button in the corner) but needless to say, I was not too thrilled about my surfing habits showing up on my Facebook profile.

So I clicked ‘No Thanks’, and hopped over to Facebook and looked at the privacy settings for this new program. And found they give you the options of choosing ‘allow’, ‘notify me’, or ‘never’.

The problem however is, that even though you can choose whether or not it is made public that you visited these sites, Facebook still has the data regardless of your privacy settings. Now I don’t mean to sound like I’m tin-foil-hat-wearing paranoid, but that does seem to encroach a little past what Facebook’s role in my life should be.

I want Facebook to sit still and let me check out how many of my friends enjoy the movie Sleepover and look at pictures of people I didn’t like in High School. I don’t need Facebook extrapolating data about me as I go about my business on the web.

For those of you that don’t know, this is part of Facebook’s new advertising platform. Don’t get me wrong, I actually think Facebook’s new Beacon system is a great idea and a powerful tool for online advertisers. It is a great way to allow users to add more about their lives to their profiles. Unfortunately, it’s being done in a ‘you can opt-out’ manner, when it should be ‘you can opt-in’.

As this gets rolled out to more and more sites, the potential for this being taken advantage of is pretty high. Because each site in the program will send requests to Facebook each time you arrive, which in-turn would allow Facebook to catalog a good chunk of the sites that you are surfing.

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