[Adama]

Some people who use Facebook as their online hangout are complaining that its new marketing program is showing their purchases for friends to see.


Those users complain that they never noticed a small box that appears on a corner of their Web browsers after transactions at Overstock, Fandango and other online retailers. That box shows an alert that tells the person their transaction is about to be shared with Facebook unless they click on "No Thanks." After 20 seconds, the box disappears, after which their consent is assumed.

Users do receive a second notice when they log on to Facebook the next time, but you can easily miss it if you click away quickly to check email or visit a friend on the site.

A young man by the name of Matt Helfgott, 20, a college student, discovered his girlfriend had just bought him a pair of black leather gloves from Overstock for Hanukkah. He says "people should be given much more of a notice, much more of an alert." And referring to his girlfriend "She said she had no idea the information would be shared. She said it invaded her privacy."

In 2006, a "news feeds" feature in Facebook that allowed users to track their friends changes to their profiles backfired, when many users labeled this feature as stalking and threatened to protest. This caused Facebook to quickly apologize and agreed to turn off this feature.

The new marketing program lets companies tap onto ongoing conversations by alerting users about their friends' activities through the feeds. There are about 40 Websites that now embed a free tool from Facebook, called Beacon, to enable the feeds.

The idea behind that new program is that if users see a friend buy or do something, they'll take that as an endorsement for a band, soft drink, or movie, etc. In some cases, a company can buy an ad next to the feed item with the friend's picture.

Fandango, a movie-ticket vendor, is another Website that uses these feeds. In one instance a man saw in a feed that his boyfriend had purchased a ticket to see a specific movie. It was supposed to be a surprise.

That raises some Security concerns. The feeds use your identity to promote something for someone else, and it may be misconstrued as an actual endorsement of a product to which you know nothing about.

That has made people anxious and Fandango has referred all inquiries to Facebook, which has issued a statement defending its practices. The officials at Faceobok have also said that the advertising supports the free service.

Part of the statement says "Beacon gives users an easy way to share pertinent information from other sites with their friends on Facebook." "Users are also given several ways to choose not to share information from a participating site, both on that site and on Facebook."

Last Wednesday, Facebook launched a new system for users to indicate what types of news feeds they like or dislike. The idea behind that is to possibly lower the frequency of marketing items, though they said that users won't be able to reject them completely.

Another concern that has arisen is, what if you happen to purchase a book from Amazon, called "Coping with Aids" or something of that nature and that information gets published to every one of your friends? This might be the kind of information you may wish to keep private.

However, there is some help looming on the horizon.

The Firefox Web browser has a tool called BlockSite, which prevents sites from sending data to Facebook.

MoveOn.org, a liberal advocacy group, formed a protest group on Tuesday and by the next day it had over 6,000 members. This group is calling on Facebook to stop revealing online purchases and letting companies use people's names for endorsements without their explicit permission. They want Facebook to realize that their users have every right to be concerned and worried about their private information given publicly.

So, what about you? Have you had any problems with Facebook?

[KellieCM]

Well, first of all, they didn't turn off the news feed feature. They just revised it to make the privacy controls more robust and obvious.

I don't personally have a problem with this, and I just can't see that it's really anything to get all worked up over. I guess I've just been around the community/social networking block too many times.