Facebook Beacon was one of the first major missteps for the massive social network that shared your personal data across partner websites. So they toned it down and allowed you to opt-out. Yet Facebook continued to collect data, and a class action lawsuit ensued forcing Facebook to terminate the service in late 2009. Now it appears that Beacon 3.0 is looming on the horizon due to pending changes to its privacy policy.

I am not surprised, especially in light of the PR disaster that was Google Buzz (contains profanity but in this case I believe it is well warranted).

When will companies learn that “pre-approving” these sorts of features equate to the type of behavior covered by CAN-SPAM? People do not want their data being shared without their explicit permission. What happened to double opt-in? This is something that should have been figured out 10 years ago. I guess companies get greedy after a while.