After being vaguely active on Facebook for a couple of months, I’m starting to seriously burn out on it.

It’s not just the volume of notifications I get inviting me to add more and more mini-apps that do the same things at 27 other useless mini-apps I’ve already got. A big part of it has become my annoyance that I get these notifications that such and such wrote on my super fun orgasmatron wall and I find that it’s the sort of thing that use to be mass-forwarded in emails (here is your horoscope and if you don’t forward this on then something bad will happen to someone somewhere in the world).

But the latest feature is potentially more insidious.

See, now that Facebook supposedly has 50 million registered users, they are trying to figure out some way to make some money from that. Rather than follow established routes, they’re trying something new. Something that a lot of people perceive as evil.

Let’s say that you’re logged into Facebook (as I always am, since I run Firefox and generally have at least half a dozen tabs open) and that you then go to some seemingly unaffiliated web site (like Travelocity or Overstock) and make a purchase. If that web site is participating in a new Facebook thing called Beacon, your purchase on that site will be logged by Facebook. It will then appear in your Facebook friends’ newsfeeds. (“Spike bought durian flavor disposable panties at eatme.com!”)

You cannot opt out of Beacon with a single click. You have to opt out for each site you visit. And it may not be so easy to find the opt-out box – and who the hell wants to have to remember to do this for every web site they go to?

So far 50,000 Facebook users have signed a petition protesting Beacon. There is also a group on Facebook now called “Petition: Facebook, stop invading my privacy,” which so far has more than 51,000 members.

Curiously, if you do a search on Facebook on the phrases “facebook stop invading my privacy” or “petition: facebook stop invading my privacy,” this group does not appear in the result set. While other sorts of searches always yield near matches as well as exact matches, in this case, not so much.

Further info here.

Hongkie Town
Share