Despite being a walled garden Facebook is close to be the perfect social network for me. I don’t work in an industry where I had to look for new business partners, contractors or job opportunities. So there is no way I could leverage professional networks like Xing and LinkedIn; I would abandon my account rather quickly, I guess. Though I am probably too old for joining other popular networks like hi5, Xanga, et al. as well. So Facebook seems to be right for me. While being serious – but not overly business-like – it is also fun, although I could do without all those zombies and vampires (actually I hate them).
Yes, everything could be perfectly fine, if it wasn’t for Beacon, Facebook’s advertising system. If you don’t know about Beacon already have a look at Technorati or Techmeme. Anyway, people supposedly can opt out of Beacon now so that their purchases on sites like Overstock and Blockbuster don’t show in the mini feed. Good? Not really, Facebook still collects information about its users even if they are not logged in to it:
They pale, however, in comparison to the third case, where Facebook was receiving data about my online habits while I was not logged in, and was doing so silently, without even alerting me to the cross-site communication.
I recommend reading Stefan Berteau’s complete post. What’s even worse, Facebook doesn’t admit it.
Today I had a look at a rather unknown feature of Facebook (see below) more than once. It’s probably just a matter of time before I delete all information and hit that link. Though will my account information, friends’ data, and mini feed information be deleted from Facebook’s servers? It’s called Deactivate, not Delete, right?
Tags: advertising system, Facebook, online habits, professional networks, social network, Stefan Berteau, Yes
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Matthias
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Carsten Pötter
