Way to go, EFF. This needs to go to the FCC; imagine a beowulf cluster of corporations sharing our purchasing habits with other companies behind our backs. Oh heck, that’s already happening.

“What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” should be the default rule of commerce, and we should not be compromising to avoid sounding “paranoid”.

Information about our purchasing habits are on a need to know basis; I can imagine a tiny few instances in which the FBI would need to know. Third party companies certainly do not need to know. They need to ASK the consumer.

I propose a radical approach to privacy. A personal information DMCA. No unlicensed exchange of any information personally linkable to you (purchasing habits, financial info, SSNs, names, addresses, etc.), ever. A company has your information solely by your opt-in consent, revocable with relative ease (isn’t the web supposed to make this easy?) at any time. Choicepoint and other “investigative” companies must pay you a personal information royalty/licensing fee if they wish to trade information about you. Like in California, all companies doing business in America must disclose to you any and all information used in hiring or underwriting - credit scores, social security job history, etc. They may NOT write a contract saying you will waive the right to a licensing payment for use of your personal information; no exceptions. Violation of this law is equal to the fines payable for “stealing” an mp3.

That’s my hard line personal information DMCA proposal. I’m sure that if it gets legs, it’ll be compromised down, but hopefully not too much.

I did not like Linked In and its “endorse me” feature which a lot of people I did not know used, to ask me to endorse them. Linked In was totally worthless to me. So a few months ago (after having been on Linked In for years), I asked Linked In to delete my details from the site. End of story.

I don’t want that step to happen at all. I don’t want to participate in Beacon at all.

If that’s non-negotiable, I’m staying out of Facebook and continuing to recommend people stay away from it.

Facebook, Orkut, MySpace to help service providers bid for services to users : For example, I have my profile on your social networking site, and I would like to buy auto insurance. Using my profile data and my actual details like car, driving history, car model, etc (that I can make available on your social networking site under profile), insurance companies should come up with the best quote and let me know. Instead of me going to tens of insurance companies websites and getting quotes, they should be able to come up with direct quote for me.

Thanks, Avinash

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I’m taking a slightly more contrarian view, however.

I’ve gotten enough value out of Facebook as it is that I am willing to pay a nominal monthly subscription so that I don’t see any Social Ads.

More here:
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But it’s true. This is another step forward on the not-so-long road to turning social networks into gussied-up data warehouses.

If Facebook were an old man driving around in a van, we wouldn’t let our children talk to it. “Come on little girl, the fun is right inside. Just tell us a little about yourself and you can be a part of the party, too!”

My understanding is that the way they can correlate your information on other sites to your information on facebook’s site is by correlating the two cookies (between the two domains). So if you log on to facebook, then make sure you log off and clear cookies before you log on to any other site. It is much easier to do this in Safari and Firefox than it is to do on IE. On Safari you can use their Private Browsing feature to completely bypass the cookie issue.

I guess the question is, do you really need to remain logged on Facebook for the whole day.