Comments on: Blockbuster Online & Facebook: No Longer My Friends

By: Marion Jensen

Marion Jensen — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:12:59 +0000

John, as the article stated, I turned off all notifications of activity on external sites. I did this when Kongregate was broadcasting which games I was playing on their site. I was burned once, and realized it was my fault for not changing the privacy settings. However, Blockbuster still got through.

I don’t really care one way or the other what they do, I just know I’m not using services that handle customer information in this way.

By: John

John — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:03:58 +0000

This is failure on your part. When you join a social network or any social graph for that matter, it’s your responsibility to assure what’s public and what’s private. You can’t always just assume.

By: fornetti

fornetti — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 10:20:39 +0000

I do not believe this

By: Matt Marcin

Matt Marcin — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 08:23:12 +0000

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.

By: Bob Caswell

Bob Caswell — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:23:58 +0000

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.

By: Jake Ludington

Jake Ludington — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 16:42:11 +0000

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.

By: Paul Ellis

Paul Ellis — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 05:08:58 +0000

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”.

By: Bob Caswell

Bob Caswell — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 04:49:57 +0000

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.