Facebook's motto is apparently "Do Evil"

So your friendly neighborhood social networking site, Facebook, decides to try a radical ad model, with the help of its users. Unfortunately, it forgot to ask the users first. Facebook launched a new ad program called Beacon, which shows its users' actions on other sites to all in their network to see. As long as users are asked for permission prior, this shouldn't be a huge problem. Well, Facebook decided not to. Instead, they forced users to opt-out instead of opt-in. So, users are surprised to log into the social site and see a trail of what they'd done on completely unrelated websites. Bummer deal to the user who searches for the latest soft-core movies on Amazon.com and this shows up on their Facebook profile for all of their coworkers and other network contacts to ogle.

Of course, this ad model doesn't sit well with most of the savvy online community. There has been a bit of a backlash by Facebook users, which is well-deserved, and also by those concerned about the loss of privacy. This probably also is starting to concern those advertisers who would not want to be on the receiving end of the users' wrath. So, Facebook has decided to do an about-face and default users to the opt-out. Problem solved, right? Nope. But users still continue to report privacy violations, such as, saved recipes from Epicurious.com showing up under their Facebook profiles.

This isn't the first privacy bumble by Facebook. Back in the spring, there was the problem of "not-quite" private Facebook profiles. If I didn't have a network of colleagues, friends and family who use it with some regularity, I'd have ended my relationship with this (anti-)social network long ago. I am convinced that it is a flavor of the month site, just another useless MySpace clone, so I am looking forward to when my contacts abandon it (hey people I do still read emails) and move on to the next bleeding-edge site.

Read more at Wired News about Facebook's insidious, ill-conceived user privacy-tracking antics.