Facebook Caves To Privacy Protests Over Beacon

jcatcw writes "After weeks of privacy protests over its advertising system, Facebook's CEO announced that users now can turn the system off completely. CEO Zuckerberg said 'We simply did a bad job with this release.' Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, called the announcement from Zuckerberg 'a step in the right direction.'"

Mutually Assured Defamation

[Ckwop]

from the privacy-is-dead dept.

There's probably enough information about me on-line to uniquely identify me as an individual. There's also enough in what I have said on-line to date already to completely rule me out of any political position in this country.

However, I sometimes feel safe in the knowledge that everybody who has used the web has left a similar sort of trail. All this information will stay on the web for decades or perhaps even centuries.

Our privacy, it seems, is protected by the fact that if you dig hard-enough you can find dirt on anybody. Dirt is only good if you can use it and Google shows us just how many people have dirty linen that can be easily obtained.

When all this shakes out over the next twenty years and the Facebook generation grow-up and get careers, we may well find out that our privacy is protected by mutually assured defamation.

Simon

How do you turn it off if you're not a member?

[bn0p]

From the article "Facebook came under withering criticism from its users and privacy advocates alike when a security researcher revealed that the ad system tracks user activities on third-party partner sites -- including the activities of people who never signed up with Facebook, who deactivated their accounts or who were not signed on to the site." [emphasis added]

What are they doing with the data of people who never signed up for Facebook in the first place? Is there a list of the 3rd-party sites that provide data to Facebook so that they can be avoided? I know that Facebook is not the only site to track user activity, but this underscores the need for a "Do Not track" list. Like that will happen anytime soon :D.


Never let reality temper imagination.

Re:Boycott the Advertisers (list)

[Anonymous Coward]

quote: eBay expects to make this feature available to sellers on eBay.com in early 2008.

They'll probably think twice about that, now that they've seen the impact in made on facebook.
I think implementing this on eBay would make it easy to boycott sellers by spreading false rumors through your "friend network".

It's Too Little, Keep Protesting

[Robert Chapin]

Facebook is still collecting the information it shouldn't have. The fact that users can opt to not have it broadcast to their friends means almost nothing in terms of privacy.

Re:TFA is wrong

[novakyu]

The only problem is ... you only have their word for it. This is the same people who, after repenting the privacy-invading "features" of News Feed, made the exact same (if not much worse) privacy-destroying add-on to that feature. Do you really trust them? I know I don't.

Now, if we agree that we can't trust these guys to tell the truth like it is, can you really trust them not to collect the information? What he says is "facebook won't store the info when external sites send it to them". That reads to me like: "Yes, sheep, don't worry about this mysterious communication to facebook.com when you are browsing on eBay. They are probably sending us all your personal, private actions, but we swear solemnly that we will not use or sell this very lucrative information."

As far as I am concerned (until someone either hacks into or raids Facebook servers without their notice and does a full investigation), they are still collecting and storing your information. They have proven over and over again that they have no integrity, and unless they say something like, "if you opt out, we will make sure to notify external websites not to send us your information," that is, something you can verify to be true, whatever they are telling is at worst a damned lie, and at best, half truth.