aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Thursday, November 29, 2007

Assumed consent is evil and maybe illegal

If it’s not already it should be:

Facebook applications can be based solely on direct sales. Companies like Overstock.com allow--or should I say encourage--Facebook users to purchase from their website through their application without ever leaving Facebook.com. The problem is that purchase information is being shared. After making a purchase, the Overstock.com app displays a small box in a corner of the browser interface following a transaction. This box alerts users that information will be shared with other Facebook users unless they click on it to negate that information form being shared. The box fades away after a half minute or so, after which consent is assumed, and all your friends can see what you bought.

I’m no lawyer, but that sounds kind of “iffy” to me. And, even if it is a legally binding procedure, it certainly isn’t going to do much for customer satisfaction! There are, evidently, other large e-commerce sites with similar or identical interfaces, and my instinct is that Facebook and these large companies will solve the problem quickly. It makes a good example, however, of social media gone awry. The term “social” does not automatically imply that sharing is the default; part of being social is having the choice to share or not share. Purchasing things, especially during the holidays, often involves gifts, and the surprise of a well-chosen gift to a friend (who may well be in your Facebook world) is as social as it gets.

Hell, I think the non-leaky clickthrough should be illegal. Of course I’m going to hate “assumed consent.”