Anything that gets moveon.org upset is a good thing in my book. what a bunch of losers.

It's taken me a few months to figure out how to work the multi-tiered privacy settings (which are always effing changing) in the way I want. I learned, without Facebook's help, that even though you delete a feed from your mini-feed it still goes into your friends' news-feeds. I learned that applications will do their best to spawn themselves into your friends' profiles unless you un-click the right notifications and are mostly not worth the trouble. People ask why not just quit Facebook? I have too much to gain to keep bridges with people from my past. Facebook can change. Unfortunately until then people will just have to be pro-active about their privacy.

man, that is a mean looking cat! don't mess with it!

I have not had any of my purchases reported nor seen any purchases from friends (and I have quite a few) in the news feeds, so I assumed this was just another stupid application.

I now get why people are so freaked by this.

Hi,

Facebook is now affiliated with a variety of websites, all of whom can, with your permission, send the actions you take on their sites back into Facebook. These actions will appear in your Mini-Feed and may appear in the News Feeds of your friends.

If you are logged in to Facebook and take an action on an affiliated site, the website will alert you that it has a story it would like to send to your Facebook profile. You can then choose to take the following actions:

1. You can click the 'Learn More' link to find out more about that story or edit your privacy settings for these external stories.
2. You can click the 'This isn't me' link if the Facebook account does not match the person using the external site. In this case, Facebook will never publish the story or otherwise share any information with the user's friends on Facebook.
3. You can click 'No Thanks' in which case Facebook will never publish that story or otherwise share any information with your friends on Facebook.
4. You can click 'close' or simply ignore the notification in which case the story will be sent to Facebook, but will not be published on the site. Next time you navigate to the Facebook Home page after interacting with an affiliate site, you'll receive a second reminder that the affiliate website is about to publish a story on your behalf. If you select 'See More' and then click the 'X' next to any story, the story will not be published. If you click 'close' or navigate away from your home page, the external story will then be published in your Mini-Feed and potentially the News Feeds of your friends.

Please keep in mind that affiliate websites never have access to your profile information, nor does Facebook receive any personal data about you from an affiliate site. Let us know if you have any further questions regarding the privacy settings for this feature.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Joey
Customer Support Representative
Facebook

Gee, that really helped. thanks, Joey.

i don't even have my real name on facebook, but i am still conscious of giving up too much privacy -- it should be expected that facebook has a purpose that isn't about our entertainment.

"By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company [Facebook] an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing."

The KIND OF OK part:
"You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content."

@consumer_999: I assume you're referring to the "search your gmail addressbook" stuff. Yeah, it's dumb, I don't do it, but Facebook hardly invented the dumb idea.

@darkclawsofchaos: Facebook's best explanations are on the Facebook help pages. Can't help you if you don't have an account, but you don't really need help if you don't have an account, do you?

@TWinter: You're totally wrong -- there is no application to install. Facebook's partner sites are loading a javascript from Facebook servers so that Facebook can use its cookies to associate the user with the transaction.

@Propaniac: According to the Facebook help pages (am I the only Facebook user who reads those?), the external site notifications only work if you're logged into Facebook. Either don't use the "remember me" box when you log in, or remember to use "log out" link (top right corner of every page on Facebook) before you go shopping.

You know, I'm getting the feeling that there are many people on Consumerist who don't know how browser cookies work or what they're used for. It's not like Facebook is the first website to try to track people this way.

I think the problem is that people use these sites without thinking what sort of info they are putting out into the world and the implications of adding these applications

i don't use any of those crappy programs.........

Not being a Facebook user, my understanding from reading this is that Facebook retail partners basically XSS you?

@rmuser: so laziness has actually saved my ass then, not only I gotout of meaningless work and commitment, I also prevented this shit too

I wouldn't be surprised if this "no way to opt out" thing is part of their monetization plan - I'm sure they are being paid by these other companies to display stories about people using their products. Obviously they don't want people to opt out of that, that's money in the bank for them.

@darkclawsofchaos: Sound like? Heck, I'd say it IS spyware. Possibly even an XSS attack.

@consumer_999: Damn right. Encouraging people to enter their login details on third-party sites just trains them to fall for phishing.

Please enter your bank account number here:________

(This is only so we can keep your profile accurate and up to date. We promise we won't do anything else with it.)

@rmuser: are you sure? that makes it sound like spyware, something that can be abused and used for identity theft, especially after that article of where some facebook employees wer able to abuse their power

so how does this happen, does the company post this, or is there some program that reads your cookies? Sorry, I'm not a facebooker (to lazy make one and didn't like giving stalkers an easy chance), so can someone tell me?

@Kierst_thara: I think these offsite pages are embedding a script hosted on Facebook, which is therefore able to access your Facebook cookies, so it can tell if you're logged in, and if so, what your name is. In a sane world, it would be opt-in.

God I hate cats.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but it seems like this would be something you'd explicitly have to opt or sign in to for the merchant to be able to make a connection between Joe Smith's Busted Tee credit card order, and Joe Smith's FaceBook account.

@loquaciousmusic: When you go to a site that attempts to send information to Facebook, it'll show up in that list. Until a site does attempt to send information to Facebook, it won't show up in the list. So every time you go to another site that tries to do this, you have to go back and opt out of that individual site again.

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.

There are no sites listed below. What does this mean?

To me, the thing that makes Facebook really creepy is their knowledge of who your friends are, photos of you and your friends, your address, your friends' contact information, books you have read, political views, clubs, etc. The sheer amount of data they hold could put them (or someone else) in a position to go way beyond simple market research or targeted advertising.

It is easy think of reasons why someone, including the government, might want such information. Very few of those reasons are good. Taking a step toward to the paranoid slippery slope, it is worth pointing out that the Holocaust was aided by technology (which was advanced for its time) that allowed tracking and categorization of individuals. If you are curious, do a Google search for IBM and the Holocaust.

Good one, facebook!

When they decided to be MySpace 2.0, and the started up the whole voyeuristic/exhibitionist broadcast of every little life detail, ala twitter, I got out like a shot. I'm part of this generation, I'm only 25 years old, but I just do not understand what happened to the idea of privacy.

The catch (and its a big catch) is that if you don't click 'yes' or 'no', Facebook assumes you meant 'yes.' (It explain this in the help pages that nobody reads.) So ignoring the box is the same as approving the story. This seems like bad design to me.

I'm wondering if pop-up blockers are keeping people from seeing the opt-out boxes. Meg, you should ask that Guy You Know if he uses a pop-up blocker.

I don't want to be a pirate.
I don't want to be a ninja.
I don't care that you like the Bills.
You won't make my vote for Barrak O'bama

It makes you opt out of every site of a Beacon partner individually. There's no way to just opt out of the whole thing. Besides, such a thing should have been opt-in from the start anyway.

It's pretty amazing how in less than 4 weeks Facebook has gone from a dream application to a nightmare.