HJCotton.net

How much privacy are users of social networking sites willing to give up in order to use the service? Sites like Myspace and Facebook have a veritable wealth of information about the users of its services. Everything from addresses, schools attended and companies worked for to a group of supposed friends and a list of hobbies. People have put up with targeted advertising for quite some time on the web. I know that my Myspace profile is being parsed for keywords because it has suddenly decided I have a dire need to buy custom envelopes and find Bob Dylan memorabilia when I log in because of a Kurt Vonnegut quote and an artist’s name I have in it, respectively. That’s the kind of thing you expect though and I don’t really have a problem with it. I don’t have anything there that I don’t already have on this website – it’s essentially public knowledge at this point. Facebook, for a time, seemed a big improvement over Myspace simply because it wasn’t completely overrun with comment-spamming bots and doesn’t allow users to destroy their pages with horrible styling that makes them unreadable. Granted, being able to customize your page is a big deal. Some years ago, and shortly after discovering how to upload an HTML file to some free webspace and having my own website at a URL that took up nearly the entire address bar in my browser, I learned that just because you can have 60 images, music playing in the background and red text on a blue background on a page doesn’t mean that you should. But that’s another story.

Facebook opened up its API to external developers who can create applications for the users of the site – which is really cool and I see that as being a positive thing. I’m even using one that gives me a Kurt Vonnegut quote at the click of a button – now that’s convenient! It’s also something that never would have come about had Facebook not opened up their system to allow outside developers access. What they have also recently done is roll out a service known as “Beacon”, which has been quite controversial. This service tracks a Facebook users movements on participating sites, of which this article) states there are more than 40 of. Actions such as signing up on one of these sites, adding an item to a wish list or purchasing something directs details of that action back to Facebook, where it is then broadcast to your friends list via their news feed. These sites apparently present users with the ability to opt out of having this information sent back to Facebook, but in the article linked to above, data was passed back to Facebook whether the user was logged into Facebook or not and even when opting out of having it sent on the third party site. Clearly, this is a privacy concern. What’s more is that Facebook was making it impossible to opt out of using the service entirely, instead only giving the option to opt out from individual sites. It wasn’t until today that they announced a universal opt-out feature for Beacon. I made sure to log in and select that all important check mark today and I’m sure many others did as well. Maybe this is the kind of thing some people don’t mind, or maybe even find valuable. When a website starts tracking my web surfing actions after I have left their site, warning bells go off for me though. It makes me feel like I need to quarantine Facebook in Opera, do my regular surfing in Firefox, and use IE7 (running under Wine of course – I’ve been on Ubuntu Linux since June of this year) when viewing any of the sites Facebook lists as participating in Beacon. And that’s just not the way it should be.