Blockbuster Online & Facebook: No Longer My Friends
by Marion Jensen
Bite me, Blockbuster Online. Oh, and you too, Facebook.
About three years ago, I signed up for Netflix, Walmart DVD Online, and Blockbuster Online. I wanted to see which interface was better, and who was quicker about sending me DVDs in the mail. Netflix won, hands down.
Blockbuster has recently come out with an interesting idea, however, where you can rent online, as well as in the store. They have been pestering me to “come back” for years, and yesterday they sent me a free month. So I thought, what the heck. I’ll sign up, rent a few, and then cancel after 29 days.
I canceled after one. Here’s why:
I put Enchanted in my queue, because the kids have wanted to watch it. I thought it would be a fun surprise. It was a surprise, all right.
I wandered over to Facebook sometime later, and there in my newsfeed is a proud proclamation, “Marion Jensen added Enchanted to his Blockbuster queue!”
WHAT?!
I’m glad I didn’t add what I wanted (Beaches, Sense and Sensibility, and Pretty Woman).
Now, I’ve gone through the settings of Facebook long ago and have turned notifying all actions from external sites (nobody is so bored that they run to the web to see what I’ve been doing), but that didn’t stop Facebook. Even though the default to Blockbuster Online was “notify me first,” it posted this breaking story to my newsfeed. My co-worker logged in and saw that I had added Enchanted to my Blockbuster queue.
I’m pretty ticked.
So, the lesson? Screw Blockbuster, go with Netflix. And as far as Facebook goes, BACK OFF.
As soon as I see an alpha version of Justin Ball’s app that brings social networking to blogging, I’m bailing.
*Update* Several readers have asked why I added the Blockbuster app if I didn’t want my queue broadcast to the world. The fact is that I didn’t add the app. The app was added for me, by Facebook. I can only assume that the two systems talked to each other because I login with the same e-mail address.
5 Comments 
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April 3rd, 2008 at 12:49 am
So let me get this straight… you already went through the tedious process of opting out of this annoyance from BOTH sides. And somehow they still do what it is you were specifically trying to prevent?
If that’s true, the larger principle of what just happened reflects very poorly on both companies. I was already annoyed by this whole thing being “opt out.” But an opt out that doesn’t work? Wow.
April 3rd, 2008 at 1:08 am
Yeah, sounds kind of like the latest “telemarketing” scheme, only they don’t bug you during dinner anymore.
My first thought on this was “When are these companies going to learn?” and Facebook sure has some learning to do. But I quickly thought “Well, what can you expect for free?”
Maybe it is just me, but I’m sick and tired of the monetization model of every website being advertising. Not just advertising, but better targeted (read: privacy bending) advertising. Any company that thought Beacon 1.0 was an ok idea is either missing a substantial amount of gray matter or they don’t care about their users at all; I’m guessing ‘C’ = “All of the above”.
April 3rd, 2008 at 12:42 pm
I’m curious how the two accounts connected you together if you didn’t explicitly opt in? You’d have to ad the Blockbuster app to your Facebook and give it permission to post stuff to your news stream for it to show up.
And a better question might be, why add the Blockbuster app to your Facebook if you don’t want the updates to appear in your news stream? That’s the entire point of linking the two.
April 3rd, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Thanks for the update, Marion. So it sounds like Blockbuster and Facebook are doing some pretty serious extrapolating. Since you’re willing to share with each of them your same email address, that must mean you’re willing to share everything else equally across the two, right?
I wish companies would see how wrong that is.
April 7th, 2008 at 4:23 am
Facebook can’t actually add an app to your profile without your consent. However, when you went to add Enchanted to your queue it’s possible they had an already checked box that granted it permission.
As far as how Facebook links this information to your profile, it’s pretty easy. When you log into Facebook they give you a cookie that never expires. This cookie has your Facebook ID number in it so that you can be identified when you return.
Since Blockbuster has signed on to work with Facebook’s Beacon, all data, and I mean ALL is transmitted to Facebook. They then go through it and find out which Facebook IDs did what and theoretically they toss out the rest.
So, even if you don’t have a Facebook account, your Blockbuster activity is still being sent to Facebook. This was talked about on TechCrunch a while back.