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

Adversitement

[ickeicke]

CmdrTaco has bought a Swedish-made penis-enlargement pump!

I guess accuracy is too much to hope for

[blowdart]

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.

Not true; the FaceBook provides a secondary method of opting out, just like you can control lots of privacy tweaks already. There's a nice new option for "External Websites: You can edit your privacy settings for external websites sending stories to your profile." (this is not to say there aren't privacy problems with Facebook in general)

I guess actually looking before writing a news article would have been just too hard.

Re:I guess accuracy is too much to hope for

[Coopjust]

The main problem is that you have to opt out AFTER a site tries (or succeeds) at adding a story to your profile. If you don't respond to the popup (20 seconds OR a blocker), it assumes that you do indeed want to add the story to your profile. While you can disable it later, it might be a few hours or days before you notice if you're not a heavy Facebook user. And, you can only disable it on a site-by-site basis in this manner.

Many nontechnical users that have hare angry. Many Slashdotters use NoScript or something to that effect.

If you get the Blocksite plugin and block *.facebook.com/beacon/*, you can use Facebook normally and not have to worry about sites that implement it- the script that runs the beacon never gets to run, and there is no chance for the story to be sent.

Re:I guess accuracy is too much to hope for

[irtza]

Show your friends what you like and what you're up to outside of Facebook. When you take actions on the sites listed below, you can choose to have those actions sent to your profile. Please note that these settings only affect notifications on Facebook. You will still be notified on affiliate websites when they send stories to Facebook. You will be able to decline individual stories at that time. No sites have tried sending stories to your profile

I hope you are not suggesting that I wait until after a site sends something to my profile to have means to stop it? This would be ok, if you alone are notified of the attempt before it can be successfully carried out. What if someone doesn't notice the little blip they put up on the external site? Can they still block others from seeing something even if its only once? I won't have to worry about this because my account is registered with an email I don't use for shopping, so I am asking because I can only find out from others experiences. That at least is the point most people here are getting at.

Anything other than having the default be no consent, there seems to be something wrong with this model. I think this may mean people will start shopping with a non-facebook registered email address.

My solution from a while ago was to create a new email address for every site I register with (it is a mail forwarder - i don't actually check dozens of email addresses). This gives me the ability to delete the address if it starts getting too much spam (selling of email addresses was one of the original reasons for me to do this). a sideeffect is that it hinders (though does not block) sharing of my info amongst businesses.

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.

What do you expect on a free service?

[Ckwop]

Personally, I think it's a fair trade. What do you expect when you put all your personal information in to a web-site that is free to use? They have to make money some how and the easiest way to do that is to sell your information on to other people or come to agreements with other companies to find ways to market to you.

If you don't like that then don't use Facebook!

If you want your own soap box under your own rules then get your own site. You can even run these out of your own house now provided you're with a civilised ISP.

Simon

Re:What do you expect on a free service?

[techmuse]

At universities, this has replaced e-mail as a primary form of communication. I ask people I meet for an e-mail address. They tell me to look them up on facebook. At a university, you would literally be cutting out much of your social life if you never used facebook, because most of the people at the school expect that you will communicate with them through it. It's like saying that if you don't like the subscriptions and lock-ins that the cell companies require in the US, that you just don't use a cell phone. The price of ignoring it is huge.

Re:What do you expect on a free service?

[7-Vodka]

Orly?
Cry more.

What facebook is doing is contemptible. But if you can't take a stand against something like this that requires such a minor inconvenience... Good Lord! All it takes is for when you're exchanging information that you explain you're against facebook and you give a phone number or email address or domain name or aim name. Anything else they can use to get in touch with you. Most people will admire you for taking a stand, it shows strength. If someone really wants to speak to you in the future they will make the necessary arrangements. What's going to happen when someone really steps on your civil liberties or wrongs you in some way like, oh I don't know, the governement and you're required to make a real democratic sacrifice in order to fix things?
Are you going to sit there as you do now and cry like a little baby about the inconvenience it would bring into your life?

There was a time students would get out and protest against illegal or amoral wars, now they care more about their latte or facefuckmeintheassbook.

Re:What happens when...

[LingNoi]

The same thing the happens when you watch a porno movie and you have "let my msn friends see what I am watching" enabled..

Username is currently watching "AnalBeachNuns9.avi"

Re:What happens when...

[Wonko the Sane]

Then those minors will be PERMANENTLY DAMAGED FOR LIFE. Permitting minors to know of the existence of adult novelty items is a crime against humanity and should be punished by death.

Re:that's not the issue, though?

[Phlegethon_River]

Because it isn't just their privacy policy. It is the page where you set your privacy options. Thats why.

Re:What happens when...

[pipatron]

Care to share?

Why I quit Facebook and you should too

[Ignorant Aardvark]

It was for precisely this reason that I recently quit Facebook. I was a member of it mainly for contacting people in college, but I've since graduated, and have found myself spending less and less time using it. Meanwhile, its infringements on my privacy have grown more and more.

The first whiff of displeasure I got when using Facebook was when people could tag me in photos without my permission and have them display on my profile. Understandably, there's lots of pictures one would probably not want the world to see, especially during a job search. I did eventually find the option to disable this "feature", but it was many months afterwards. Similarly, I expect there's a way to disable this privacy-infringing commercial thing, but the simple fact is, it's turned on by default for users, and you have to actively figure out how to disable it.

That's not how this kind of stuff should work. It should be opt-in, not opt-out. Am I supposed to babysit my Facebook account into the indefinite future, disabling each new feature as it comes out, hopefully in time to prevent revealing information that I didn't want revealed? No thanks. I'll just quit Facebook. I did, and you should too. The more people who put up with this kind of crap, the more emboldened they will be to keep doing it.

Re:Wait...I'm confused

[sitarah]

"How do Fandango and Overstock know that the buyer has an account on Facebook? How do the two get linked up? Cookies?"

Any site that is part of the Beacon affiliate network has a script that can read your Facebook cookies. The code is here, for any interested. http://www.facebook.com/beacon/beacon.js.php

You buy a product on Overstock. It gets some information on your Facebook account, then asks if you wish to 'publish this story' to your Facebook account. You can click:
1) Learn more.
2) This isn't you. No publish.
3) No thanks. No publish.
4) Close. Publish later.
5) Ignore. Publish later.

4 is the problem; you can ignore or close the box, and it will, instead of thinking that means a No Publish, ask you AGAIN when you log in to Facebook. If you ignore that one, too, or do anything but specifically click No (the X in this case), it *will* publish. It's unintuitive.

Whether this is user-error or intentional design, users are also reporting that they have to opt-out of these affiliates site by site to stop publishing, because opting out of Beacon itself is insufficient or not possible. That's why people are irritated -- they never downloaded an app or asked for Beacon, didn't realize they had to specifically tell it 'no', and can't figure out how to turn it off.

Re:Facebook users...

[ScrewMaster]

Personally, I've never used Facebook or any social-networking site, and I only know what little I read here on Slashdot. Even so, it does seem like hardly a week goes by without Facebook implementing some controversial, poorly thought out feature that pisses a lot of people off. As with any large-scale data aggregator (for that is, in effect, what Facebook has become) there's the potential to screw up and hurt people. There's a need to make money, I know, but sometimes Facebook's management seems to err on the wrong side of privacy.

Opting Out

[megazork]

If you look at it more closely you can't opt out of the service generally. Every time a new site tries sending stuff to your news feed you have to go back to the Facebook privacy page and opt out of that particular site.

Aside from AdBlock, you can do the following to effectively de-activate this service:
1. Get Firefox
2. Download and Install the BlockSite plugin for Firefox.
3. After restarting Firefox select 'Add-ons' from the Tools menu.
4. Click the 'Options' button on the BlockSite extension
5. Click the 'Add' button
6. Enter http://facebook.com/beacon/* into the input box
7. Click 'OK'
8. Click 'OK' again and you are good to go.

Re:Opting Out

[vux984]

Aside from AdBlock, you can do the following to effectively de-activate this service:

I think closing ones account and would be an infinitely preferable option. Yours only resolves this one issue. But what about the next one? And the one after that?

They say don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, and that's fine, but I think the facebook baby went down the drain a while ago, and all that's left is a mass of humanity puttering around in its own dirty bathwater.

Facebook's Tactical Advantage

[broward]

Currently, Facebook possesses an *unknown* tactical advantage in opposition to Google's *unknown* willingness to commit strategic resources and influence. But once Facebook's advantage is quantifiable, I suspect that Google will guesstimate and commit enough resources to win the battle. The odds are good that Facebook's growth rate of change will hit an inflection point in the next few months. These user complaints are a direct result of Facebook trying to push a tactical advantage for strategic gain.

http://www.realmeme.com/roller/page/realmeme?entry=social_networking_meme

Once Facebook hits an inflection point, its scope of influence is bounded, i.e. predictable.

Facebook needs to change the game to increase their chances of winning.
At this point, I give them a 50/50 chance.
There's power in coalitions (see IBM's strategy with Eclipse, Sun's strategy with Java & JCP).

If I owned Facebook, I'd redo the Facebook API by combining some of the ideas of OpenSocial, then build a coalition along the lines of the Java Community Process to manage it, abdicating 49% of the power and responsibility to other companies. If Facebook does that now, they can leverage their current development community and possibly force Google's hand. If they wait, the true extent of their power will eventually be revealed and challenged.

Eeenstrookshoons

[PixelScuba]

Place dee peenoos poomp oon doo peenoos ahnd vapeedly poomp dee handool oop oont doown.

Re:Give us the List of Companies involved

[garbletext]

This might be a partial list, as I've heard reports of participating sites not on this list. But Here ya go:

        * AllPosters.com
        * Blockbuster
        * Bluefly.com (NASDAQ: BFLY)
        * CBS Interactive (CBSSports.com & Dotspotter) (NYSE: CBS)
        * eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY)
        * ExpoTV
        * Fandango
        * Gamefly
        * IAC InterActiveCorp. (NASDAQ: IACI) sites (CollegeHumor, Busted Tees, iWon, Citysearch, Pronto.com, echomusic)
        * Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE)'s Hotwire
        * Joost
        * Kiva
        * Kongregate
        * LiveJournal
        * Live Nation (NYSE: LYV)
        * Mercantila
        * National Basketball Association
        * NYTimes.com (NYSE: NYT)
        * Overstock.com (NASDAQ: OSTK)
        * (RED)
        * Redlight
        * SeamlessWeb
        * Sony Online Entertainment LLC (NYSE: SNE)
        * Sony Pictures (NYSE: SNE)
        * STA Travel
        * The Knot (NASDAQ: KNOT)
        * TripAdvisor
        * Travel Ticker
        * Travelocity
        * TypePad
        * viagogo
        * Vox
        * Yelp
        * WeddingChannel.com
        * Zappos.com

from
http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2007/11/22/facebooks-creepy-ads-put-your-mouth-where-your-money-is/
which sources the info from
http://sev.prnewswire.com/computer-electronics/20071106/AQTU20606112007-1.html

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