Privacy nuts: just add *beacon.facebook.com/* to your Firefox AdBlock Plus blacklist.

Ever been asked for details of a recent transaction as part of a security validation process by your bank?

I have

Seems to me this information could actually be quite useful to some people

No, add just add "facebook.com"

Hang on! Facebook? Privacy? Mutually exclusive, I'd have thought.

I've always said it. And now that they're becoming evil I'm feeling like they're too much of a soft target and I should pick on something else.

There's a *reason* why I've lost contact with my school mates. I hated them and I have new friends. Quite why people think it's so fantastic to connect with people you haven't seen for 20 years is beyond me.

Remember what happened to Usenet when AOL made affordable internet available to the average American? The phrase "me too" still gives me a tic. It's the same with Facebook, but thankfully they're all contained on one website and they're not spilling out all over the show.

So I guess actually I'm all in favour of Facebook.

Surely the fault lies (mostly) with the "external partner sites"? You shop at whatever.com and it's them that are allowing Facebook access to private details of a transaction between you and whatever.com.

whatever.com should have some kind of "opt-in" (rather than "opt-out") that you, the customer, has to complete to allow them to share this information with their partner(s). Opting out should be simple, obvious, perhaps even autonomous in the case of buying "gifts".

Facebook gives shops the opportunity to legally spam the friends of all their customers. They give it the veneer of "social networking" rather than the normal run-of-the-mill spam by saying "hey, your friend bought this - maybe you'd like it too?" - a bit like Amazon's recommendations? Presumably Facebook charge their partners for this service.

Oki, the service as a whole is a little "iffy" perhaps, but the fault is not entirely Facebook's (unless you want to lay the blame at their door for providing this service in the first place which appears to be MoveOn's angle).

And what does the selection ? And am I supposed to believe that this "selection" cannot be modified by any of all those wonderful "user-generated apps" that are just so much malware waiting for a moron to activate them ?

My God I am glad I don't use any MySpaceBook of any kind.