Normally, I'm not a privacy zealout. I'm okay with a relative amount of information being available online. I've posted about some potential problems with Blockbuster keeping a record of my movie rental awhile back. That's not really an issue though, since I don't doubt that my phone company keeps a record of my phone calls, etc. It's when that information is shared with people without my permission that it upsets me.

My wife logged into her Facebook account tonight (like she does probably twice a month), only to find that a record of what she had been adding to our Blockbuster Total Access movie queue was being posted for all her friends to see. My first instinct was that she had installed a "Facebook App" by accident, but she didn't have anything installed.

Digging deeper, the Privacy settings page of my own profile has a new area in it called "External Websites." What I saw is the image you see above. What's worse is that the default is to share that information, with a checkbox to not allow it. So my question is, if you don't allow it to be displayed, is Facebook still receiving the data and adding it to their database?

I think I might be deleting my facebook profile soon...

Update: Apparently, this functionality is called Facebook Beacon and it is just that, a beacon for calling attention to yourself...

I'm not a huge privacy nut. Honestly, if the government wants to waste their resources tapping my phone line, fine. They might hear my conversation with my mom, but that's about it. However, the other day, I logged into my Blockbuster Total Access account to remove some movies from our queue that we ended up renting in the store. This is a common occurrence, because every time a movie is recommended to us, we put it on our queue, amounting to a current 147 movies in our queue. As I clicked the link to view my queue, I see the above image. This confused me a bit. Apparently, Blockbuster must be logging ALL the movies you rent from them in the store as well as online. I browsed through the TOS to see what they could do with this information, and it seems as though they can do pretty much whatever they'd like to do with it.

Since the Constitution of the United States doesn't protect your from non-government entities, there's really nothing anyone can do about it. Just thought I would point out that when you sign up for something, you never know what is being logged.