Dec

4

Facebook Beacon: Are we really THAT suprised it came to this?

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I have been reading numerous stories about it, Facebook’s “Beacon” technology. Its pretty hilarious how poorly this was received, but I’ll touch on why I think its funny in a moment. Here is TechCrunch’s explanation of the whole ordeal:

Beacon is a social form of advertising that shares your purchases or other actions you take on an advertiser’s site with all your friends on Facebook through their News Feeds. What has privacy advocates up in arms, and advertisers skittish, about Beacon is the way it seems to be spying on you as you surf the Web and then, on top of that, reporting what you just did to everyone you know.

I remember when the last thing I purchased was a question my bank used to ask me to verify I am who I say I am, now they need a new question, thank you, Facebook! Companies like Coca-Cola, Travelocity, Overstock, etc. are RUNNING away from Facebook in fear of the massive lack of privacy that Facebook seems to be proliferating as a “feature”, heh.

But, is everyone really that shocked? Really? What gets me is, people *allow* these levels of information out. Did I have to put all of my IM accounts on facebook? No. Did I have to install the app that tracks my netflix account? No. Its all choice. But where they drew the line was the essential “opt-out” approach to their “Beacon’. I mean, on paper, I like the idea of a super-mega-white-pages, but its obviously so easy for a company that isn’t even that big to be able to record so many different levels of scary information that many of its users are completely unaware of.

I mean, I hate to sound like this crazy woman here, but come on, if people really think they are safe on the internet, think again is really all I have to say.

I am thinking of a new facebook app, how about an app that tells all my friends how many red lights I ran this week! Brilliant! I can’t wait until the local gov’t gets ahold of that!