I have only one friend who uses facebook to the exclusion of other online means of communication, and, while he is a very old and dear freind, I can still initiate email contact if I want to. The discovery that the ad system sends information to Facebook from participating sites even when you are not logged in was for me the last straw. I have deactivated my account, and placed /facebook.com.beacon/ in my adblock file. What I buy online, wherever I buy it, is no business at all of Facebook, and I won’t tolerate their efforts to make it so.
The story came to me via Bill Thompson’s Facebook feed, so I suppose the site did have other uses. But even if all the hip kids are playing there, I will stay in this corner by myself.
On a slightly positive note, you leaving and Facebook hastily back-peddling on this nonsense is a good sign that community action is effective in moderating such excesses.
R
I don’t know how far they have backpedalled — and I don’t see that they won’t try it on again, and again, and again. Life’s too short.
Life’s certainly too short for Facebook. But anything they (or anybody else) try will be detected and publicised, now and in the future. That’s in the nature of things.
Glad to have proven useful! Demos launched an interesting report on privacy in the online age on Friday and I used my ten minutes on the podium to point out that Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook’s founder) clearly has all the wrong instincts and is not to be trusted – first news feeds, now Beacon. It will be something else soon…
Still, I remain there (with appropriate blocks), and continue to apply the principle that I will not say anything on Facebook (or any other site) that I would not be happy to have both my mother and George W Bush reading.