Following up on my Facebook-Beacon-is-the-devil post from a couple weeks ago, we now have a Facebook group that is protesting Facebook?  The possibilities for stack overflow via poorly-planned recursion are staggering.  I kid.  Here’s the group:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5930262681&ref=nf

They have a link to a MoveOn.org petition that you can sign that will tell FB to bugger off.  Let’s hope they are successful and at the very least, FB provides an opt-in, vs. opt-out, mechanism for the new Beacon service.

(h/t Ethan Zuckerman via Dave Winer)

So it turns out to no one’s surprise that Facebook’s new Beacon platform is going to try to grab consumer behavioral clues wherever it can get its grubby little mitts on them. Nate Weiner from the Idea Shower found this out the hard way. During a few minutes relaxing with Desktop Tower Defense, Facebook, in partnership with Kongregate, decided it was going to inform the world of his time-wasting ways.

Nothing has gotten me to install the BlockSite plugin for Firefox — until now.

Is there anything in Kongregate’s privacy policy about this specific sort of information sharing? There’s this paragraph:

Unless we tell you first (such as at the time we collect information from you), or unless it is part of a specific program or feature in which you have elected to participate, we do not share your personally identifiable information (such as name or email address) with other, third-party companies for their own commercial or marketing purposes.

To me, that doesn’t solve the Beacon intrusion privacy problem. Maybe. It’s a tough call. Either way, I read on Nate’s blog that Jim Greer, the CEO of Kongregate, jumped in right away and is going to add some privacy feature(s) to Kongregate to make the Beacon relationship much more explicit. Good for him.

(h/t the Idea Shower » » Block Facebook Beacon)