MoveOn.org is annoyed with Facebook over privacy issues. Apparently, people on Facebook can see what you’ve been buying on sites unrelated to Facebook and share this information with your friends. According to MoveOn.org, this is not only a violation of privacy (the feature is opt-out rather than opt-in), it’s been ruining Christmas/Holidays/Birthdays/Whatever for Facebook users.

From MoveOn.org:

“Oh my gosh, my cousins entire christmas shopping list this week was displayed on the [Facebook News] feed. thats so messed up. This has gotta stop!” – Tasha Valdez from Michigan:

“I saw my gf bought an item i had been saying i wanted… so now part of my christmas gift has been ruined. Facebook is ruining christmas!” – Matthew Helfgott from NY

We thought this sounded psychotic so we logged in to our mostly-neglected Facebook account and sure enough…one of our friends had bought a T-shirt from Busted Tees. We asked him if he knew that this information was being broadcast on Facebook.

Guy We Know: man that is kinda creepy

Consumerist: apparently this is ruining people’s shopping for gift-type sh*t

Guy We Know: yeah I would prefer they’d not

Guy We Know: “User privacy is extremely important to Facebook. We designed Facebook Beacon to enable effortless sharing, but we’ve also put in features to protect user privacy. When you send an action to Facebook, the user is immediately alerted of the story you wish to publish and will be alerted again when they sign into Facebook. The user can choose to opt out of the story in either instance, but the user doesn’t need to take any action for the story to be published on Facebook.”

Guy We Know: yeah that never happened

Consumerist: Ugh.

Facebook must respect privacy [MoveOn via BoingBoing]
(Photo:Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten )

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