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I was a latecomer to the whole facebook thing. I finally got in in grad school, when it seemed I was the only one without an account. And ya know, it was pretty cool. Was a pretty clean, intelligent interface, with some useful features. Then the applications came. Now, the usefulness is clouded by idiots fighting with vampires and slayers, sending stupid icons back and forth, etc. It is obnoxious, but not as bad as MySpace, and mostly ignorable. Now this whole Beacon thing though is about enough to make me give it up forever.

Tonight I logged into my blockbuster.com account to add some movies to my queue. After adding the movie, I got a little pop-up from facebook about it. I never signed up for anything. Blockbuster never told me it was sending information to facebook. But, apparantly facebook is sticking a cookie in my browser for blockbuster, which then reads it to get a tag to my facebook account, and proceeds to forward information about my movie selections on to facebook to post to the world. Now, facebook quickly wised up and gave users the general opt-out option so that “information from external websites won’t be displayed on your profile”. Well that’s just great. But, first problem: I had to actively opt OUT.  Second problem: I don’t care if it is in my profile or not, facebook has no business with the information at all.

But I thought about that a bit more, and realized facebook wasn’t the real culprit. Blockbuster (as well as all the other sites partnering with facebook) is the one betraying my trust by forwarding my purchase information to facebook, without providing me any ability to stop it, and without even notifying me that is was going to do it! Blockbuster has a FAQ page that says I should just go to facebook and disable it from appearing in my profile. That’s not good enough as far as I’m concerned.

I think a switch to Netflix may be in order, and it may be time to give up the facebook thing altogether.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 1:27 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.