I use Facebook, in fact I use it more than myspace. Mostly because myspace never really grabbed me and it’s kinda become a pimps n ho’s, listen to my crap band, I am a comedian be my friend kind of place. Any site that lets people add annoying music and fucked up formatting to their pages can suck it.

So today I am shopping for A1’s birthday present which I bought on overstock.com. I am in one tab buying his stuff, and in another tab logged into facebook. Next thing I know Overstock has somehow magically managed to post in my facebook newsfeed that I just bought x and y from Overstock.com esentially blogging to the world exactly what I just bought from overstock when I bought it and how much it was. That my friends is a little too much for me. I even closed facebook out and logged back in before i removed it from the facebook newsfeed cause for a minute I thought I’d lost my damn mind. Yeah I hadn’t there it was for all the world to see and neither facebook nor overstock had happened to mention in any thing I saw that they were somehow linked up.

After some research using “the google” I learned that overstock uses a facebook beacon. This is from what I’ve read a little code snippet that creates an overstock cookie on my machine when I make a purchase. This cookie then gets picked up by facebook (I think cause I was using the same browser for both) and BAM there is my purchase info suddenly thrown right in to my newsfeed where all of my friends including friends of A1’s could easily read it.

Here are my thoughts- this is fucked up. I love all my friends, I love the facebook but I think it’s pretty damn shady that all of a sudden any of the sites that are partners with Facebook and use their beacon can suddenly automagically pickup and update my profile with things I may not want my friends/co-workers/former co-workers to see. The people in my facebook friends list include former bosses, and lots of former coworkers and while this time is was just a birthday present from overstock and I caught it right away, what if next time it had been a newsfeed that “spinster Emmy just purchased a 17″ double headed pull start gas powered dildo at $49.95 and a ball gag for $14.50 from monkeyfuckers.com” (this is a random site name I’ve made up so I do not know nor do I really want to know what that site may be but I’m sure it’s something that you can’t unsee). This is NOT the kind of information I just want thrown up in my damn profile for all to see. This is especially true since I hadn’t noticed anywhere on the overstock site during my searching or purchasing any relation to facebook so had I not happened to be on a screen where I promptly saw my facebook newsfeed I could have gone hours without knowing it had been done.

Now of course I plan to be uber paranoid and anytime I buy anything online I will promptly check my facebook profile to make sure it’s not been published to the world. shady Shady facebook/overstock