I wonder how many people in the UK are aware of the Facebook beacon launched recently. It tracks your usage on partner websites (say a retailer) and when you buy something from them it places a story in your news feed. As far as I can tell there aren’t any partners in the UK yet. The problem with this scenario was that you couldn’t stop it happening – ie you couldnt opt out, it just happened automatically.
Thankfully (and unsurprisingly) Facebook have changed the system – now it will only appear if you give express permission for it to do so. Good news indeed. But I wonder if they solved the other issue I heard about – if you have multiple people using a single computer, it added the news to the first person who logged into their facebook account. So if Person A buys a book and person B logs into Facebook first. The action appeared on person B’s newsfeed.
At least you can now say no to the info being public (Facebook still has the data about you in their systems mind) 🙂