Read this post on Ethan Zuckerman's excellent blog about all things Africa and techie. If you don't want to, fine, let me summarize. If you buy something on a website partnering with Facebook, like Overstock.com, Facebook can access the account information nested in the partners cookies for your web browser. In practical terms, if I buy The Complete Idiot's Guide to Super-Charged Kama-Sutra from Overstock, Facebook knows, and will put a little story in my feed, for all my friends to see, saying that, "Matt Allison just bought The Complete Idiot's Guide to Super-Charged Kama-Sutra". Now of course one can tell Facebook upon logging into Facebook that you don't really want overstock.com purchases to appear on your story feed, but as of right now there is no option to categorically deny permission for Facebook to pull stuff from partner websites. So for each and every partnership Facebook assumes that it has this right, until you say no. Putting the burden on the Facebook member like this is an ominous direction for Facebook to be heading in.
I would imagine that almost anyone would feel like this is a violation of our privacy, but what is there to do about it? One could just quit Facebook, but there's lots of reasons that we actually have grown to depend on Facebook to make our social world jell, not unlike cell phones, or IMs, or whatever. You could disable cookies on your browser, but then Facebook won't let you log in. Or you could buy stuff on a separate browser. But all of these options basically allow Facebook to continue violating a very basic assumption that many of us have about the internet. We expect that when giving information to one site when we buy from them that our purchase isn't going to be shared to our friends unless we share it, and more importantly, that that one site isn't going to tell other sites about what we're buying. Enter 2.0.
Sheizer! that is freaky. I did enjoy the love story of the vacuum cleaners.
Posted by: Luke at November 18, 2007 10:29 PMThat is freaky. Is this just covering up the fact that you really did by The Complete Idiot's Guide to Super-Charged Kama-Sutra?
Posted by: Luke at November 18, 2007 10:31 PMThough that does seem rather under-handed, I do think it's simply to be expected. Any time you buy something from an "affiliate" you need to just assume that they're trading data as part of the deal. I try to hermetically seal my Facebook presence from everything else I do on the web.
I guess I see this as less a privacy problem as a control problem. They're closely related, but I'm much more annoyed at the thought that Facebook is doing anything I didn't ask it to than at the thought that it's displaying information I didn't offer. I think programs should do what we actually ask them to do and little else.
Posted by: ryan at November 19, 2007 9:42 AM