Over at Americablog, John Aravois noted that Facebook is taking things from external sites and putting them into your Facebook notification network:

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.

At first I wanted to laugh as usually this entailed the user of Facebook specifically having to add applications, widgets, etc. to opt in on their own accord (Anybody who’s big on privacy and the Internet, those of us who love Slashdot for example usually have an idea of what we’re opting in on).

I decided this would have been a good topic to point out some discrepancies and so went further to Ari Rabin-Havt at Open Left to note about Facebook’s opt-out policy:

Under Beacon, third party sites pay FaceBook to use its members, without permission, as their corporate spokespeople. In this case it was an ad paid for by Fandango - hunting around over the past few days, I have also seen ads from Overstock.com and Kongregate.com.

Facebook claims the practice is fine because users can “opt-out.”

Which almost made me think I was going on the right path because once again, you can opt-out; that said, I figured that since I rarely go to those sites to buy anything, I might as well see if there was a specific category within Facebook that allowed me to opt out. To my dismay, I found that there was a new privacy setting (I like to keep track of what I can and cannot do within Facebook) for external sites:

Still, I figure I can just go into “Edit Setting” and turn that off, so I click in further:

Well, that’s odd, I cannot actually “opt-out” of this setting as I do not have any notifications at this point (mainly because I usually buy from the nerd sites that are big on privacy anyway: Yeah, Thinkgeek!). My first thought is at the least annoyance, then curiosity as to how this can even be legal, and then finally… oooh, this will be great for some of my clients!

See? My bias with working at an advertising agency and being big on privacy (eg: big Slashdot / AdblockPlus / Stealther fan) can lead to useful situations–at least for me.

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