Lauren has a good posting about Facebook and how they have implemented a Beacon system. I mentioned this in a previous post. What this does is notifies your friends when you have purchased something. Basically boils down to that SPAMMING has evolved, to ‘let’s spam our friends’… nice world. So here we have Facebook that has better privacy controls for the user than let’s say MySpace, and then Facebook goes and spoils it by implementing this blatant invasion of privacy. I don’t want all my ‘friends’ to be notified of everything I purchase. Maybe in 10-20 years it will be normal, but NOT today.
Anyhow they have now changed the system so you need to approve before a notification is sent to your friends. Although I agree with Lauren’s view completely, what’s wrong with a simple Opt-out? We should have a choice and it should not be defaulted to Opt-in or click this button to keep your privacy every single time you purchase something, we should have the choice to set our default settings to Opt-out or Opt-in. And if we choose to Opt-out, it should stay that way unless we -the user- change it!