Facebook Turns Your Life Into a Sales Pitch

In August we blogged about privacy problems on the social networking site, Facebook, and its plans to unveil a new targeted advertising system. The system is now up and running. It not only analyzes your activity on Facebook , but also monitors your other Internet activities and reports them back to your Facebook friends in the form of advertisements.

Buy a big-ticket holiday present at Sony for your loved one and the surprise might get spoiled when they see an advertisement about the purchase.

Book a last-minute trip on Travelocity and call in "sick," buy some expensive new shoes on Zappos, or rent a movie at Blockbuster or read an article in the New York Times and before you know it, others might know about it too.

How does it work? When you visit a site that has partnered with Facebook, a cookie in your web browser alerts a Facebook "beacon" written into the code of the site. The beacon then automatically reports your activity back to Facebook, turning your web surfing into advertisements without any human interaction necessary. You might not even realize that the ads are happening.

Facebook and the companies that have partnered with it call these advertisements "stories."These companies currently number 44, and include the New York Times, Yelp, Epicurious, Blockbuster, Coca-Cola and Sony.

With its new ad system, Facebook is seeking to monetize and publicize activities that were previously under your control. Instead of telling a friend that you are excited about your favorite band coming to town or that you really liked a movie, Facebook is going to do it for you unless you keep telling them not to.

Facebook users can opt out of the new advertising scheme, but not easily. You are first presented with an opt-out option when visiting the partnered website. Once back at Facebook.com, you are given a second chance to cancel the advertisement. Unfortunately, users have reportedly been missing obscurely placed or time sensitive opt-out options.

It appears that Facebook had planned to have a much easier process for users to opt-out of the advertising. But, before the system was released, Facebook decided to remove the option to opt-out of its new ad system all at once. Now you must opt out of each partnered website individually as they try to place an ad in front of your friends. And even if you opt out, it remains likely that Facebook will still receive information on your activities at partnered websites.

In recent months, Facebook has outpaced its rivals in attracting new members and adding features. In October, a small part of Facebook was purchased by Microsoft, the site's advertising partner. As part of that sale, Facebook was valued at $15,000,000,000.00, over $300 for each of its millions of members'self created pages.

Advertising is not the only way your personal information might be more available than you realize. While Facebook and most other social networking sites do offer privacy controls that let you decide who sees your information, that doesn't mean that the information isn't collected, analyzed and retained. It also does not mean that the site's employees don't have access to your information. Many people were shocked when it recently came to light that Facebook's employees can see who the site's members are looking at and how often they look. Some have even called it a perk of working there.

Facebook's new advertising system has not gone unnoticed. The political action group MoveOn.org has started an online petition asking Facebook to scrap or change their new advertising scheme. Over 49,000 Facebook users have joined a Facebook group asking the site to stop invading their privacy. The Electronic Privacy Information Center is considering whether to file a complaint with the FTC alleging that the ad system violates several different consumer protection laws.

What can you do?

Tell Facebook that they need to change their new advertising system to an entirely opt-in program.

You can also block Facebook's new ad system directly using the browser Firefox and a plug-in.

And be sure to opt-out using Facebook's current system by going to your privacy settings, selecting the "external websites" option, and clicking the option to block ads as they come in from the individual companies listed.