Facebook Beacon: Someone is recording your every e-move

So I recently found out about this Beacon program that Facebook recently implemented. If you're unaware of it, it essentially is a partnership and program between Facebook and many corporations in which any activity you perform on one of the partner sites will be recorded by Facebook, potentially displaying on your profile (depending on what you set your privacy level at), and almost assuredly that information will be sold to the other partners. HOWEVER, even if you choose the privacy option that disallows companies to post on your wall, you sleep soundly knowing that your information is still being collected.

Anyone have a problem with that? It's like 1984 except the corporations are taking the place of the government as Big Brother.

Now, I'm not saying that Facebook is the first or the only to track all of my data. I am well aware of Google's questionable privacy policies. And I also know that my information is being stored at basically every page I visit (hence, the reason I allow cookies from only pages that I frequently use and trust). However, this is probably the most egregious violation of my privacy that I have personally witnessed. It is obviously a profit-motivated strategy in which we are unknowingly, unwillingly the subjects of intense scrutiny.

Do they really think that we will get some extreme added value of knowing what book or CD our friends bought on Amazon? Or that Alex O'Hagan was playing WoW yesterday? Or Jennifer Gahenna bought whatever-the-hell at Wherever-the-hell? In reality, if something was that good, you'd find out about it. Normal advertising has served us well for a long time, and I for one am thoroughly opposed to such invasions of privacy for this alleged added value.

You'll have a hard time convincing me that this move had any altruistic motives or a motive beyond profit. To be clear, I don't think Beacon was implemented with malicious intentions; I do think that there needs to be some serious dialogue on how far companies can pry into our lives. Or, to put it another way, on how far they can go to continue to indoctrinate us into this consumer culture. (Fact: Approximately 70% of U.S. GDP is derived from consumer spending.)

Here are some basic points that I think apply here (these may or may not have been mentioned above):
1.) The definition of privacy needs to be redefined.
2.) Limits need to be placed on how far third parties are allowed to dive into your data, what data they are allowed to keep, how long they are allowed to keep it, and what they are allowed to do with it.
3.) Some serious discourse needs to be had on the purposes and motivations of corporations. It is my contention that the profit motive of corporations is an indelible, if implicit, factor in this. Why is that a problem to me? I am not convinced that profit should be the #1 aim of any corporation, but that needs to be reserved for another post.
4.) Consumers need to be very careful of what products they use and need to be aware of what they are handing over when they sign up to use services like Facebook.
5.) Education on the impacts of the loss of privacy needs to happen.
6.) I am extremely concerned about the pervasiveness of corporations into every aspect of our lives. I am no history scholar, but I would go so far as to say that the role that corporations play in society today far outstrips the role that the Catholic Church played in Europe in the Middle Ages (partly due to technology).

Anyway, I am getting off topic and can offer my critique of capitalism another time. To close, there are at least two things you can do to help protect your information.
1.) Use the privacy settings (under External Websites under the Privacy options) to disallow companies to post stories on your profile. Please not the caveat above: your information will still be collected, just not used in quite the same manner.
2.) If you use Firefox, you can download an extension called Blocksite to prohibit Beacon from working (at least in theory). Details here. There are other add-ins that can enhance privacy like Track Me Not and NoScript, so check those out.

There is a way to block sites using IE and Netscape (as far as I know), but I don't know how to do it.

Take care.

P.S.: Sorry for the length of this, but I had a closing thought: For all the ease of life that technology was supposed to offer (which it has in some respects), it is providing us with a whole new set of complications that are far more tenuous and impacting than any of us could have ever imagined.