5 comments

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  scott

  1 year ago

  This still is not good enough. Any opt-in functionality should be on the external websites. MoveOn.org should now go after Facebook's partners and make sure that they stop distributing their customers' personal information to third parties like Facebook without the explicit consent of customers.
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  Cos

  1 year ago

  My response to this, on the Facebook thread ( http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=593026268... ):
  
  Facebook seems to be changing Beacon to opt-in, but in a screwy way:
  http://www.allfacebook.com/2007/11/breaking-fac...
  
  "Users must click on “OK” in a new initial notification on their Facebook home page before the first Beacon story is published to their friends from each participating site. We recognize that users need to clearly understand Beacon before they first have a story published, and we will continue to refine this approach to give users choice.
  
  If a user does nothing with the initial notification on Facebook, it will hide after some duration without a story being published. When a user takes a future action on a Beacon site, it will reappear and display all the potential stories along with the opportunity to click “OK” to publish or click “remove” to not publish."
  
  If they actually do it that way, it's good as far as privacy goes, but I think it still shows they don't get it.
  
  They will definitely satisfy the requirement that nothing gets shared until a user has taken a specific action to choose to share it, and that's great. However, I suspect that when people first encounter this, their initial reaction will likely be paranoia. Huh, wha?? Where did that come from? How did Facebook get this information? etc. As a result, a lot more people will think it's creepy and say no.
  
  Facebook should be building a system based on enticing people to choose to participate, and see it as a positive feature to adopt, rather than a negative feature to stomp on. This change would be a partial step in that direction, but I wonder why they wouldn't go all the way. All I can think of is that they really don't get it, and don't understand why people have reacted the way they have.
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  Jim

  1 year ago

  The changes are sufficient.
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  Brian

  1 year ago

  Websites are still sending your personal information to Facebook. Although Facebook may not be sharing it with your friends, their privacy policy allows them to use it themselves or share it with other companies. Either all websites using Beacon need to make it opt-in, or Facebook needs to create a page where you can control the sites from which it accepts Beacon information about you. Facebook should then discard any information from sites not in that list.
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  Stephane Rodriguez

  1 year ago

  Guys, be sure to be logged off Facebook before you visit a website. Problem solved.
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