Facebook; Online Tracking

Last week, AMERICAblog posted an astonishing item about the social networking site Facebook. A friend of John Aravosis had noticed lots of details about his online behavior were being made available on Facebook, even though he had not chosen to make them available.

In Ari's case, he found out that his Facebook profile reported that he had bought tickets to a movie the other night - it even listed which movie and the date and time he bought them (oops, and his boss thought he was working). Kind of creepy if you consider that Ari could have told his fiance that he was working late that night while Facebook said otherwise (he didn't, but I'm just saying). Or how about if Ari kept buying tickets to gay films, would that have been an interesting fact for Facebook readers to know about, let alone Ari's fiance? (Again, he hasn't... well I think he hasn't, maybe I need to check Ari's Facebook profile.) And God only knows if Facebook has similar info-sharing deals with Amazon or other book vendors. Buy any books lately on herbal remedies for cancer, AIDS, or any other disease? Or how about a book entitled "So you've had an affair" or "So you're gay" or "Coping with mental illness." Buy any sex toys or condoms online? You get the picture.

From what we've been able to glean, Facebook automatically opts its users in to this privacy-violating pyramid scheme and the only way you can get out of it is by visiting every single one of Facebook's corporate partners (whoever they are, we only know about Fandango at this point), and telling each and every one (if you can figure out where to tell them this) to stop publishing your private information on Facebook. God forbid that Facebook asked its members to opt in to this little scheme and/or gave its members a one-button opt-out rather than requiring them to visit every site on the Internet and search for the Facebook-privacy-violation-opt-out-button.

Well, in face of massive protests, Facebook has decided to flip the process and allow users to opt into its data-sharing program, rather than require them to opt out.

Within the last 10 days, more than 50,000 Facebook members have signed a petition objecting to the new program, which sends messages to users’ friends about what they are buying on Web sites like Travelocity.com, TheKnot.com and Fandango. The members want to be able to opt out of the program completely with one click, but Facebook won’t let them.

Late yesterday the company made an important change, saying that it would not send messages about users’ Internet activities without getting explicit approval each time.

Read the whole Times piece. It provides fascinating and disturbing insight into how difficult it is becoming to maintain any significant degree of privacy today.