Facebook.com: Increasingly Overbearing and Terrible

About half an hour ago I bought tickets to see No Country for Old Men using fandango.com. Later I logged into Facebook.com (for which I use a different email ID and password) and saw a new entry on my news "mini-feed." It said, "Nick bought No Country for Old Men on Fandango." What? The Fandango purchase had absolutely nothing to do with Facebook; there was zero visible overlap. Has Facebook been signing agreements with online commerce companies so that whenever I make any sort of online purchase -- or sign up for anything, or just do anything -- it'll show up on my Facebook page as advertising?

(If so, let me just take a moment to say that Fandango.com sucks. It's an incomplete and poorly run site with absurd "convenience charges." Don't buy from them.)

Also alarming is the apparent cross-pollination of information between Facebook and Fandango. The only data that Fandango has is my old AOL email address and my credit card (which Facebook doesn't have, unless I'm forgetting something). And I use a newer email address as a Facebook login. So how did the two companies know for sure that I'm the same person? Ominous. And perhaps kind of creepily admirable?

Facebook in general has been getting worse and worse. It used to be a streamlined and intuitive network; now it's messy, ugly, intrusive. All these applications that automatically send invitations (Do I want to take a movie quiz? Do I want to bite someone? Do I want to buy a pony?) are the Facebook version of panhandlers on the subway, and the lack of a capability to put absolute filters on the news feed means that you can't accept anyone's friend request without reading about everything they do. To the handful of strangers I've friended in the past, I apologize.

There are still uses for Facebook -- well, two: looking up people you like and looking up people you don't like -- but the signal-to-noise ratio just keeps getting nastier.

Comments

[mburton]

It works by asking your browser if you are logged into Facebook.

Just did this myself. Here's more detail on what exactly happens:

-You buy ticket on Fandango
-Once the order goes through, a Facebook-looking window slides up from the bottom-right corner telling you that it's going to post a notice on your News Feed.
-If you do nothing, it apparently posts it.
-If you click "No thanks," it doesn't post it.
-There's also a "More information" link that sends you here:

www.facebook.com/help.php?page=56

which includes the following:

"Affiliate websites will generate stories about your actions when you visit them only if you are logged in to Facebook at the same time. You will always be notified when another website wants to publish a story about you. So if you're on Fandango buying some tickets, and you don't see the little notification pop up in the corner of your screen, that means there is no story being generated. If you do see this notification jump up, you can opt out of having that particular story published by clicking "no, thanks"."

[drblack]

You need to block cookies from the get go and never use sites that use them.
At the very least use Firefox with Flash and Ad block software.
I want the European law enacted in the USA.
In Europe ANY info about you is owned by you ABSOLUTELY.

[huffdog]

I find Facebook and Myspace to intrusive and prefere MyPlayspace.com.

[pchdriver]

I already dislike how Facebook tracks activity within its site. No different than a hall monitor making constant, mundane announcements. Billy visted his locker. Johnny tapped Sarah on the back. Jane said hello to David. It's idiotic. I've tried to disable it to the extent I can.

This Fandango-Facebook connection is downright troubling -- if not surprising. I reset my Safari on a regular basis because I suspect there's some cookie-driven market research going on. Maybe not a bad idea?

[middleoftheroad]

The fact that they look at your buying history is BAD ENOUGH, but to then take it upon themselves to POST IT is BULL SHIT! myspace should jump all over this. why does facebook think that this is ok? This WILL get them into trouble with their members, just a matter of time.

[GK]

Shortly after joining Facebook last July, I posted this notice on my Wall there:

4 counts against Facebook:

1) Facebook has a huge Privacy Policy. Privacy is inversely proportional to the length of a Privacy Policy. Facebook ransacked my address book to solicit friends for me, unbidden.

2) Facebook's Terms of Service deserve a parody. They are long, legalistic, onerous, and absurdly overreaching and self-serving.

3) The "Find Classmates" ads are [or were] misleadingly integrated with Facebooks main pages. (Also, isn't it about time "They got DIVORCED?")

4) Bad javascript; animated ads cover up content, even on my 19" monitor.

--Gene Keyes http://www.genekeyes.com

[sweetwood]

check out the CIA and facebook connections. prisonplanet.com had an article a while back. i'm very skepticle of all the applications you need to install for stuff...very suspicious.

[broccolli]

There is so much fakery on the internet, it is ridiculous. It used to be astroturfed that there were a lot of lone trolls in basements causing havoc on boards. But check out advantageconsultants.org. They come out and admit that they can "flood the zone" with blogger attacks. Has anyone heard of netvocates, The Rendon Group, and others?

Now we learn that a Steven Hertzberg of the Election Science Institute has been busy astroturfing for Ron Paul. He has also been a prolific poster at a nutjob website called BreakForNews.com. This is the same guy who has promoted Matt Damschroder, a Republican operative. This is the same guy who whitewashed election fraud in Ohio in 2004 by saying exit polls are a moot point. But a Professor Freeman from Princeton I believe has argued differently. Now who are we to believe, a math professor or a Republican operative who inexplicably rose to prominence in the election reform movement, only to dismiss the exit polls? At around the same time, the Bush Admin. was saying the Ukraine elections were shady because of exit polls. There is a good word for all of this- mendacity.

This Hertzberg story is getting buried.
http://allaircraftarenotinvolved.freeforums.org/viewtopic.php?t=78&start=0

[westwind]

My guess is that the information sharing you experienced was achieved by the use of cookies. I dislike intuitively the tracking and recording that cookies do, and try to control them as much as possible through the settings that the Netscape browser incorporates, but even that can become time consuming.

This cross-pollination of cookies is something new to me though. Not only is Fandango storing information in cookies which have no possible use for the better operation of their site, but they are allowing another company to access them, which is extremely creepy. Don't use Fandango or Facebook: Got it.

[Newfycrat]

I'm really curious if Facebook has inserted a cookie that tracks all of what you are looking at and buying. The only way I can think of to find out would be to delete all your cookies and then buy something on Fandago, and see if it appears on Facebook.