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.
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"."
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.
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?
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
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.