Facebook recently launched a new service called Beacon which tracks, via participating partners, the purchases of it’s members. The partnership seems to be monetized by the posting of recent purchases to “friends” mini-feeds further driving traffic to affiliates. I don’t think very many people want what they are buying being the business of anyone, let alone being broadcast to all their friends without their permissions. Aside from the obvious problems, like spoiling a Christmas surprise present or a more intimate product purchase, this is just plain wrong. They launched the service quietly and made it OPT OUT, meaning you are part of it unless you tell them you don’t want to be. Opt out just isn’t how things are done anymore. We live in a double OPT IN world. You have to ask me if it’s okay and then confirm that I’m the one that said okay.

But this isn’t my only concern with Facebook and them keeping my data “private”. I recently did a Facebook application for a client and during the process I realized that I had access to just about everything in a users profile that visited the application. Most of it’s just fluff data, nothing personal like credit card info, social security number, email address, etc. But my real name is in there and, if I choose to, my political, religious and other affiliations. Someone could use that to target me in a number of ways that I’m not comfortable with. I haven’t seen an option to hide my data from 3rd part applications. I signed up to use Facebook and granted them and my friends access to this data. The odd thing here is that Facebook used to be a completely closed system and now the door has swung way back in the other direction and in my opinion, is playing it loose with their members privacy. I’m not easily spooked by privacy concerns but fir the first time since I’ve been online (1994!) I’m actually considering closing my account with a company due to how lose it is with my personal data.

Facebook could easily fix this by making Beacon opt in and making data captured by 3rd party developers optional in my profile as well. A simple check box for both would be both easy and make me feel pretty safe. I’m not sure I’d trust it to actually work at this point. I guess with rumors that the creator of Facebook stole the code from friends at college make this seem even more shady. Hopefully they’ll be able to solve all these concerns and make everyone happy. I know they need to make money but that’s never an excuse to violate your members privacy. Not ever.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Privacy