Facebook Users Complain of New Ad-Based Tracking

Tech.Luver noted a story about facebook users complaining over ads where their shopping habits are shared with their friends as if they are endorsing products. The neatest part is that you can opt out- if you click a box that disappears after 20 seconds... wait to long, and they assume you are totally fine with it.

Comments

Re:I guess accuracy is too much to hope for

[Garridan]

Facebooks' policy is, and has always been, "It's better to ask forgiveness, than permission" with regards to policy. They claim to be for your privacy, but whenever they roll out a new feature that might be a privacy concern, they opt you in and don't make any sort of announcement so it can be months before you notice that you can close out such features. I used to be on facebook, and I recently closed my account because of such bullshit. A lot of my friends, my fiance, my mom, etc., acted rather put-out like I'm intentionally avoiding them or something. It's wierd how much pressure I've felt (though not from my fiance, she gets it) to re-join. News like this is just what I need to show people why I left.

Faceook Architecture

[ewhac]

I just opened an account on Facebook recently -- mostly to see what the big deal was. It seemed harmless enough until I got a request to join a particular Facebook "app", in this case an app that compares tastes in movies.

I use Firefox exclusively with NoScript installed. I clicked on the link, and... What the hell am I doing on this completely different site? And why is it trying to run JavaScript at me? Further, why is it trying to run a cross-site script from Facebook?

It was at this point that I began to suspect that the pages Facebook is presenting me are not, in fact, always generated by Facebook's servers, but instead can be cobbled together from any number of sites and servers located anywhere, and that these sites all exchange data transparently with Facebook.

I haven't read their developer's pages or their API specification, so I'm only guessing here. Does anyone know if this is in fact true?

Because if it is -- to borrow one of Jon Stewart's terms -- then it's an absolute catastrofuck of a design, and everyone but everyone should run screaming from Facebook as fast as they can.

Schwab