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Can Blockbuster be Sued Over Facebook/Beacon? 102

Posted by Zonk from the facing-the-book dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A professor at the New York Law School is arguing that Blockbuster violated the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988 when movie choices that Facebook members made on its Web site were made available to other members of the social network via Beacon. The law basically prohibits video rental outfits from disclosing rental choice of their customers to anyone else without specific written consent. Facebook's legal liability in all of this is unclear; with Blockbuster it's a straightforward case of not complying with the VPPA, the law professor says."
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Can Blockbuster be Sued Over Facebook/Beacon? More

Can Blockbuster be Sued Over Facebook/Beacon?

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  • Going to be the knife to fatally stab blockbuster? As we know they have been hurting from netflix

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by syntaxeater ( 1070272 )
      Doubt it. If anything, I would guess this will be the case where they decide the term "Specific Written Consent" is synonymous with any EULA or application of your signature to a document.

      • Re:is this (Score:5, Insightful)

        by faedle ( 114018 ) on Friday December 14, 2007 @02:30PM (#21700130) Homepage Journal
        .. except there is mountains of case law that says otherwise: that EULAs are, in essence, only marginally enforceable.

        This being in some hidden Facebook EULA, or on some 'policy page' for Blockbuster does not mean "the user notifies us in writing". That has specific legal meaning: if they don't have a SIGNED PIECE OF PAPER with the words "I allow you do release my video rental records", they don't have notification in writing of permission.

        All this is irrelevant, anyway: the worst that's likely to happen here is some states' attorney general will file a lawsuit, get it certified as "class action", and Blockbuster will settle out-of-court and pay some piddly fine + attorney's fees and send everybody who asks a $5 for free rentals. Big deal.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Shakrai ( 717556 ) *

          Blockbuster will settle out-of-court and pay some piddly fine + attorney's fees and send everybody who asks a $5 for free rentals. Big deal.

          Eh, those settlements usually cost the offending company millions of real dollars (i.e: the attorney's fees and fines) and millions of implied dollars (the cost of offering all those free rentals).

          Granted, a few million bucks is a different animal for a company like Blockbuster (631 million market cap [google.com]) then it would be for you or me, but it's not pocket change for them either.

    • Re: (Score:1, Offtopic)

      by CastrTroy ( 595695 )
      Am I the only one who actually likes the business model that BlockBuster has over Netflix? I like going down to the rental store, and getting the movie that I want. I had Zip.ca for a while, and I didn't like that I had to watch whatever they chose to send me. I also didn't like that sometimes movies didn't show up in my locked mail box (I'm in an apartment building), and I would lose a slot for many days while they tried to resolve the issue.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jedidiah ( 1196 )
        The problem with the BlockBuster model is that it assumes that the
        local brick and mortar store will have what you want. If it is
        popular then it is likely already out of stock. If it is unpopular
        then it is likely not even carried by your local store.

        Netflix -> Amazon.

        • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          According to your logic, the store is not likely to have any movies in stock at all.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jedidiah ( 1196 )
            10 Copies of Asshole the Movie and Freddy Got Fingered doesn't count.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jedidiah ( 1196 )
            They also have to have not only WHAT you want by WHEN you want it.

            There is a temporal element here that is non-trivial.

            A fat PVR that handles PPV well makes more sense than either of them (netflix or blockbuster).
            • Except that if you watch more than a couple of movies a month, PPV is more expensive than netflix.
              Even if you only watch a couple, the lowest netflix one is still cheaper.

              Plus, the movies aren't necessarily letterboxed on PPV and you don't get all of the extras. Nor does PPV have the TV shows on DVD that have become very prevalent. (Syndicated reruns are hacked up for more commercials + bugs/time compression, etc.)

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by jedidiah ( 1196 )
                Netflix still suffers from the same "I can't get it when I actually want it" problem that conventional rentals suffer from. If you are only interested in being a miser than Netflix might be for you. OTOH, you might be better off with HBO and a PVR.

                Also, not all PPV movies are "expensive". Some cable providers have a variety of pricepoints for different movies.

                Also, Netflix isn't that cheap either.
                • Are there cheaper PPV movies than $4?

                  I actually have a couple of PVRs, and have actually thought of getting rid of netflix sometimes, but it's really convenient, esp now that I'm slowly running out of the tons of stuff I've PVRed with the ongoing strike.
      • I never liked Blockbuster because of their past history of censorship (see "Last Temptation of Christ"). Maybe they don't do that anymore but there's still a bad vibe for me there. Before Netflix, I always preferred Hollywood Video. And with Netflix, I've never had a problem getting the movies I want. Why take the trouble with going to the video store -- one or two movies delivered to my mailbox every week is as much as I ever find time to watch these days, anyway.
        • I'm more surprised at this LAW that I never knew existed preventing a movie rental place from sharing your rentals without consent.

          For once, a law I applaud, I only wish (at least in the US) that they would take this law and expand on it. Make it illegal for ANY commercial (and possibly most govt.) entities from sharing your personal information without express consent. It sure would cut down on a lot of unpleasant things we have due to all the customer information sharing. Junk mail....credit card applica

          • From what I read, maybe we just need to publish the Supreme court credit card #'s and maybe we can get stronger credit protections too. I don't think this law wouldv'e existed if Justice Bork's video rental habbits had not been published in the newspaper.
            • You're thinking of Clarence Thomas.

              • Re:Pissed off the wrong guy (Score:5, Informative)

                by KingAdrock ( 115014 ) on Friday December 14, 2007 @05:29PM (#21702592) Journal
                No he isn't.

                From Wikipedia...

                During debate over his nomination, Bork's video rental history was leaked to the press, which led to the enactment of the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act. His video rental history was unremarkable, and included such harmless titles as A Day at the Races, Ruthless People and The Man Who Knew Too Much. The list of rentals was originally printed by Washington D.C.'s City Paper.[5]

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Shakrai ( 717556 ) *

            I'm more surprised at this LAW that I never knew existed preventing a movie rental place from sharing your rentals without consent.

            The Video Privacy Protection Act [wikipedia.org] was passed after the contentious nomination hearings for Robert Bork [wikipedia.org] to the US Supreme Court. During the hearings somebody leaked his video rental history to the press. Shortly afterwards Congress passed the law.

            For once, a law I applaud, I only wish (at least in the US) that they would take this law and expand on it. Make it illegal for ANY commercial (and possibly most govt.) entities from sharing your personal information without express consent

            Call me a cynic, but the only reason it passed was because somebody disclosed the rental history of a prominent person. We won't see similar legislation in other areas unless there is a negative impact on someone fairly high up the "food chain". One can on

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Re:is this (Score:4, Insightful)

            by onemorechip ( 816444 ) on Friday December 14, 2007 @03:09PM (#21700678)
            I don't have a problem with Company X choosing not to produce Movie Y because they don't see commercial potential. Studios have to make those decisions all the time (and bad business decisions are inevitable). After all, they have to put up a lot of resources to get a movie made. But if Movie Y does get made, and Company Z, that is in the mainstream movie rental business, refuses to make that movie available to its customers, only to appease some rabid bunch of loonies, then I have a problem with Company Z. I can also understand it if Movie Y is in some niche market that Company Z doesn't play in. It's the caving in to special interest threats like these that I don't like (this holds, whether or not I had any interest in seeing Movie Y).
            • Comment removed based on user account deletion
              • These two cases aren't the same. One case is self-censorship. I'm not even sure that such a broad use of the term "censorship" is a good thing. Maybe "self-representation" is more accurate. I fully support anyone's right to publish or not publish submitted materials, as they see fit. Call it an agenda if you like, but it doesn't matter: it's a basic freedom. The other case is caving to blackmail. It only opens the door to further blackmail and reduction of freedom.
                • Comment removed based on user account deletion
                  • I don't know if they "banded together" or not. I won't ask for a citation because such banding is not relevant; if they did then they were all presumably willing participants. Under that presumption none of the studios were censored by this "band". Ask anyone -- or any group/band/cartel or whatever noun you care to apply -- to publish something; they are free to say yes or no. And Blockbuster is free to choose the movies they carry, I'll grant them that. But someone else -- not Blockbuster -- decided that B
                    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
                    • I object to government censorship of movies and ideas, as well as to the crowd-hysteria brand of censorship. If the government were to prevent a studio from releasing a film, I would object just as strongly. However, the citations you gave seem to tell of one individual who put public pressure on a studio to bow out. And the individual happened to be a state assemblyman. Is this an instance of one individual exercising his free speech rights, or is this government censorship? Maybe it's the latter, but some
        • I didn't say anything about blockbuster's business practices, just their business model. I don't rent from them personally, I use a smaller local place to rent movies from.
          • You're right, of course, they are separate issues. However, Blockbuster's business model doesn't have any significant advantage (for me) over Netflix's. Between the two busines models, I'm neutral as a customer. Given my prior reason not to use Blockbuster, I rent from Netflix.

            As an investor, I might also find that the lower overhead of the Netflix model is an advantage.
      • It is a cool idea, but even Blockbuster's purely online service has pretty crappy selection, and getting a movie that wasn't released in the last year will usually involve a wait. With Netflix, unless it's a truly obscure movie, my turnaround is 48 hours at the most.
    • Very unlikely anything that has been brick and mortar for as long as Blockbusters has will actually die. Yes, its easier, cheaper, and more efficient to do things of this nature online. Same goes for banking, bill paying, and shopping.
      But there is still an intangible value of going out and getting it. Video browsing for examble...most non-nerds have 1 family computer, To gather around and so, no go back! Wait I wanna read about that one! As a family, or even a group of friends going out to pick out a

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sqlrob ( 173498 )
        Hollywood Video has been dropping like flies here, so it's possible. They were founded the same year
    • probably will be laughed out of the courtroom since you have to have a. consent to it on facebook, and provide the information to access your account. blockbuster isnt making the disclosure choide; they are allowing you to choose to have it disclosed.

      if anything i dont see how this much different than netflix and bbuster having rss feeds for each persona nd their queue that dont require any authorization afaik

      call me crazy but i dont see how this will do anything at all to them. one way or the other. espe

  • Yes, but... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jo42 ( 227475 )
    Didn't Facebook members make their movie choices public in the first place?

    So this public information was then used by someone else.

    What be wrong with this?

    • Re:Yes, but... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by hansamurai ( 907719 ) <hansamurai@gmail.com> on Friday December 14, 2007 @12:53PM (#21698744) Homepage Journal
      Yes, the users did give permission to Blockbuster to broadcast their rentals. So this is really an issue between "written consent" that the summary says and electronic consent without a hand-written signature. I would guess there's tons of precedent one way or the other, though I wouldn't know which way this would lean.

      • Re:Yes, but... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Broken scope ( 973885 ) on Friday December 14, 2007 @01:02PM (#21698908) Homepage
        The issue is that facebook opts int by default, doesn't fucking tell you, then makes it's it unclear on how you disable the "feature"

        • Re:Yes, but... (Score:5, Informative)

          by IcyNeko ( 891749 ) on Friday December 14, 2007 @01:22PM (#21699154) Journal
          I wrote BBOnline about this, and this was the reply they gave me:

          Thanks for contacting Blockbuster Online Customer Care.

          I'm very sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused. When you log in to your BLOCKBUSTER Online account, the site uses "cookies" to determine if you have ever visited Facebook.com [facebook.com]. (Cookies: a collection of information, usually including a username and the current date and time, stored on the local computer of a person using the Internet. It is used by websites to identify users who have previously registered or visited the site.)

          If cookies detect that you have a Facebook account, regardless of whether or not you have installed the Movie Clique(TM) application, then activities on blockbuster.com [blockbuster.com] such as rating movies or adding movies to your Queue will be sent as notifications to your mini-feed and friends' profiles. You will see a "toast" for each action resulting in a notification. If you want to permanently disable the Facebook integration on blockbuster.com [blockbuster.com], you can easily change these settings on Facebook by clicking on Privacy Settings for External Websites. Under "Allow these websites to send stories to my profile" for Blockbuster, click "Never" and Save.

          You may see a pop-up on blockbuster.com [blockbuster.com] which introduces Movie Clique(TM) encourages you to link your BLOCKBUSTER Online® account to your Facebook profile. If you don't want to see the screen pop anymore, click the "Do Not Show This Again" box and click Save. I hope this information helps, feel free to contact me anytime.

          So basically, they snag your facebook cookie, then they add your rental info on your account without asking permission, forcing itself on your account, and announcing away. It's up to you to then uninstall that shit.

          BBOnline: See you in court!

          • If you want to permanently disable the Facebook integration on blockbuster.com, you can easily change these settings on Facebook by clicking on Privacy Settings for External Websites. Under "Allow these websites to send stories to my profile" for Blockbuster, click "Never" and Save.

            This is new functionality that Facebook just added. If you want to be sure, google for "Block Facebook Beacon". Plenty of articles on how to use add-ons in Firefox to completely disallow Beacon from getting data on you.

          • The worst part about this business is not that Facebook tells your friends. It's that Blockbuster tells Facebook in the first place.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by mpe ( 36238 )
              The worst part about this business is not that Facebook tells your friends. It's that Blockbuster tells Facebook in the first place.

              The worst part for Blockbuster, you mean. Since this is where they are breaking the law in question.
          • They don't force anything, you have a chance to decline the posting while you're on the Blockbuster site, and even if you don't decline it then you still have to OK the posting the next time you go to Facebook before it ever shows up in your mini-feed. The legal issue here is that the information is being sent to Facebook in the first place, not that it's being announced to your friends.

            • Re:Wrong (Score:4, Interesting)

              by Culture20 ( 968837 ) on Friday December 14, 2007 @05:20PM (#21702470)
              You have a 5 second window to "cancel" the sending of the info, but it's worded in a way that you're forced to think about allow or deny... then it chooses on its own and sends. And... you don't get asked to confirm the post. The post happens whether you want it or not, then you are forced to remove it if you don't want it. Beacon==bad UI from a human user standpoint

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by WK2 ( 1072560 )

                You have a 5 second window to "cancel" the sending of the info

                The 5 second window you speak of is a pop-up, and many people have their browsers configured to not display pop-up windows. These people will never get the warning, and will just have their porn habits displayed for the world.

          • Wait a minute.... If this is indeed true, how is this technically possible? How can one domain even detect the presence of a cookie for a different domain (besides exploiting a cross-site scripting bug)?

          • Re:Yes, but... (Score:4, Interesting)

            by anticypher ( 48312 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [rehpycitna]> on Friday December 14, 2007 @03:59PM (#21701398) Homepage
            Beacon also uses Adobe Flash "stored data" space to write cookie style information, that can be read and written to by any site with a flash bug.

            This was the buzz all this week at a conference on how to make money from internet tracking. Adobe controls the settings on how much information can be written to your local hard drive, and they sell the ability to anyone willing to pay. There is a global setting that users can turn to "off", but Adobe ignores it if they are given enough money. Since Flash tends to be installed system-wide and on all browsers on a machine, it doesn't matter if you clear out browser cookies or try blocking tracking sites. If a partner site sticks a 1x1 pixel flash bug on their site, it has the ability to read tracking info from any other site, and to write back additional information.

            Beacon is clever because it creates a large enough "cookie" that many sites can write into the cookie without changing the size taken on disk. Beacon also defines exactly how to parse the information, and how to write new info without changing the total cookie size.

            Of course, I was just watching a canned demo of this, so the company claiming to be behind Beacon could be making it all up, but the sales pitch was pretty convincing. I haven't the time or inclination to verify this, as I don't ever look at face book, and generally don't allow flash on my machines (which leaves the web looking very poorly these days)

            the AC
        • On top of that, you have to set your privacy options for EACH RENTAL so that your friends and relatives can't see it, instead of being able to set private/public for your entire queue. So anyone who wants privacy has to go in and set each video they add to their queue to private, and it's public in the seconds/minutes it takes a user to do that (yes, some people still use modems, get disconnected, boss walks into the room, etc.)

          Does anyone know if making your queue public by default is also a violation of

      • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Yes, the users did give permission to Blockbuster to broadcast their rentals.

        Sorry, but not noticing the opt-out checkbox that disappears after a few seconds is not equal to "written consent" and should barely be considered "electronic consent".

    • No! The whole controversy with Beacon is that everyone was opted-in without their consent, and their purchases suddenly started showing up to other people on their Facebook profiles

    • Re:Yes, but... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Tim C ( 15259 ) on Friday December 14, 2007 @12:53PM (#21698758)
      No, this is about Beacon, the Facebook feature that allowed participating websites to publish stories on your Facebook account about the dealings you had had with them - e.g. items you've bought, or in this case, films you've rented.

      Beacon was particularly controversial because it was not only opt-out, you couldn't opt-out of it altogether, you could only opt-out on a per-participating company basis *after* that company had already published a story. Facebook has since made changes due to the backlash the original version caused.

      This isn't a case of users making information available and someone else using it, this is the Blockbuster website making available information about its users who also use Facebook, apparently in direct contravention of this legislation.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by bn0p ( 656911 )
      What the users did on the Facebook site is not the issue. From the article "... when movie choices that Facebook members made on the latter's [Blockbuster] Web site were made available to other members of the social network".

      Unless the Facebook members gave Blockbuster permission in writing to share their movie choices, then Blockbuster violated the law. As discussed in an earlier thread on the Beacon program, it was originally set up as an opt-out program, so many (most?) users had not even given Face

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by CSMatt ( 1175471 )
      I can only assume that you are talking about the "Movies" column in the basic info section.

      Your rental history will give people a much more accurate representation of your taste in movies than a voluntary list, especially if renting online is your primary way of watching movies. Some people might not want such an honest list being exposed to strangers (or even "friends"). The fact that they can't prevent Blockbuster from transmitting this data to Facebook (other than blocking Beacon) makes this an issue.

  • 1988? (Score:1, Troll)

    by mckniffen ( 983873 )
    People complain that the US's laws aren't keeping up with technology. And yet in this case, a law from 1988 is being applied today. Does anybody else smell the irony?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by DeeQ ( 1194763 )
      Does giving out private information really need to change in 19 years. Its illegal to do so then and still is now hence private.

    • Re:1988? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by spiritraveller ( 641174 ) on Friday December 14, 2007 @12:53PM (#21698748)
      What exactly has changed since 1988 that should make this law different?

      If the law says that this information must be kept private, the internet and computers don't make it any less private.

      Rather, the newfound popularity of the internet and computers should make privacy even more important, because once information is released, it spreads far more quickly and easily.

    • Less ironic than you think. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 14, 2007 @01:04PM (#21698938)
      > People complain that the US's laws aren't keeping up with technology. And yet in this case, a law from 1988 is being applied today. Does anybody else smell the irony?

      The only reason the VPPA [wikipedia.org] exists is because the video records of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork [wikipedia.org] were leaked. To this day, the act of invading the privacy of a politician for political advantage is called "borking".

      Bork's video rentals were unremarkable, so there were no skeletons in Bork's closet. But from that day on, every Senator and Congressman knew that their video rental histories were also subject to exposure to news agencies, and Washington acted to protect itself. If you've got something to hide, you've got plenty to fear, and Washington was evidently so terrified that they made the VPPA apply to regular citizens, not just politicians.

      The only way we're going to get a pro-privacy law out of the government is for some enterprising hacker to leak the clickstream of everyone in the government about 20 years from now. Today, that won't work -- because 99% of government officials don't even use the "series of tubes", let alone depend on it for their gay hookers and pr0n. 20 years from now, that will have changed, and a similar Bork-style scandal will erupt. Just imagine the kinds of privacy laws we'd have if someone like Sen. Larry "I'm Not Gay" Craig (R-estroom) had been bound for higher office, NSA leaked their logs of his Intertube traffic.

      We know when you've been sleeping,
      We know when you're awake,
      We know if you've been bad or good,
      So be good for goodness' sake!
      Oh, you better not surf!
      And zip up your fly!
      Stop tappin' your toes and trollin' for guys,
      Election season's comin' to town!

      • R-estroom...DAMN I wish I'd thought of that.

        Like Bill Mahr's version of that old board game, Clue: "A Republican, in the Men's Room, with his Cock".

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by David Rolfe ( 38 )

        Sen. Larry "I'm Not Gay" Craig (R-estroom)
        That gave me a good chuckle, too. Esp. since I just posted about him on an older thread. Good one :-D
    • Not everything needs to be updated. Just like people still die from murder 10 years ago, we still do today. If anything more, we are valuing privacy more than we did in 1988.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by eples ( 239989 )
      What irony? Dude, there were supreme court cases decided in the 1880's that still apply to software today. The Lotus 1-2-3 vs. Excel lawsuit from a couple decades ago, for one classic example. I don't know why anyone would find this ironic at all. It's not even a new phenomenon.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by WK2 ( 1072560 )
      The problem isn't that US laws aren't keeping up. The problem is that they are difficult to enforce, and rather than politicians trying to fix this difficult problem, they feel it is easier to just make more laws, and claim that they are needed to keep up with technology. This results in a feedback loop, because making more useless laws makes all of them more difficult to enforce.

      The crimes are assault, murder, theft, and fraud. Perhaps a few more. These haven't changed since the genesis of civilization.

  • Privacy is why I dropped Facebook. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by neo ( 4625 ) on Friday December 14, 2007 @12:58PM (#21698850)
    You can't spend much time on facebook without some third party application asking for personal information. More than that the "viral" content is vicious, asking to check your various mail accounts to send requests for more people to join. This is just friendster with a new twist, but the twist is dangerous. You have no idea who you are giving up your information to. Want Big Brother? Think about how facebook looks to the CIA or NSA and now you entire social network was mapped. Not by them, but by you.

    No, I quit facebook. Deleted as much as I could before I left, but I know they still have it.

    Facebook is dangerous. Period. Go ahead and be a pirate/ninja warrior... but take a look at who wrote that ap. They get your infomation.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by rucs_hack ( 784150 )
      Given that the entire point of the site is to share information about yourself, I have a bit of a problem with people complaining that it shares information about them.

      It's a free service, not a charity. They need to turn a profit, like any other company, and the only commodity is the information that you *chose* to give them in the first place. Don't like it? Don't use it, it's ever so simple...

      What's next, people deliberately setting themselves on fire and then suing the company they bought the matches f

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Intron ( 870560 )
        Yes. But it isn't the stuff people put on Facebook that is being published, is it? It's messages like "Rucs_hack just rented Gigli from Blockbuster!" posted on your Facebook site. To use a typical /. (strained) metaphor, if I let you drive my car, can't I complain when you start sleeping in my house?
        • That does go too far, yes, but as I said, thew whole point of the website is to share your information. If we paid Facebook for an account I'm sure it would be a lot easier to control what of your information they use, but we don't, and as a result they will data mine you for all your worth.

          Anyone who didn't think this would happen is fooling themselves. ANy compaany will try first, and back off only if they have to. Companies that play nice will get dropped by investors. Besides, how long before it happens

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Intron ( 870560 )
            I believe there is work underway to advertise to you by your location, determined from your cell phone. I'm sure Verizon would sell me out in an instant if there was a buck to be made.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by CSMatt ( 1175471 )
        Except that you didn't expose the information with the expectation that it be sold to advertisers or the government. You only intended it to be seen by select individuals. This is why a lot of people pretended to be 14 or 15 on MySpace so as to get a private profile.

      • Given that the entire point of the site is to share information about yourself, I have a bit of a problem with people complaining that it shares information about them.

        I think most people might be ok with sharing information with those friends they have so long as THEY control what information gets released and to whom.

        I have a big problem with just anyone who is on Facebook gets to view my information. If I could limit who knows what about me and didn't have to worry about micro-managing the changing details about me that get spewed out of every orifice of Facebook every week then I could see signing up. This includes advertisers and the government. I don't want t

    • Parts of it do bother me. I have to allow the "app" access to my information just to see a video or to look at a picture. They don't explain why they need that access either, you can't say "no access" and still see the video or picture.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mini me ( 132455 )

        I have to allow the "app" access to my information just to see a video or to look at a picture.

        That's the fault of a poorly developed application. Facebook applications technically do not require you to allow access to your information just to view a video or look at a picture.
        • Not poorly, intentionally. If you want something to spread virally you make it so people have to add it to interact.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tim C ( 15259 )

      More than that the "viral" content is vicious, asking to check your various mail accounts to send requests for more people to join.

      I've not seen this at all - the worst I've seen is the apps that invite you to invite your Facebook friends to add the application. I've not had a single application ask me to supply my email address book details (and of course I wasn't stupid enough to supply them to Facebook when I joined).

      Go ahead and be a pirate/ninja warrior... but take a look at who wrote that ap. They

      • I never give my real date of birth to any website -- it's one more piece of information that seems to be asked when applying for any kind of loan or credit card, so I don't want that info out there. If it reduces my chances of being an identity theft victim even by a small margin, it's worth thinking about.

    • Think about how facebook looks to the CIA or NSA and now you entire social network was mapped. Not by them, but by you.

      I've posted this before on this topic, but since you mentioned it...

      The Okhrana, the Czarist predecessor of the GPU, is reported to have invented a filing system in which every suspect was noted on a large card in the center of which his name was surrounded by a red circle; his political friends were designated by smaller red circles and his nonpolitical acquaintances by green ones; brown circles indicated persons in contact with friends of the suspect but not known to him personally; cross-relationships between the suspect's friends, political and nonpolitical, and the friends of his friends were indicated by lines between the respective circles. Obviously the limitations of this method are set only by the size of the filing cards, and, theoretically, a gigantic single sheet could show the relations and cross-relationships of the entire population. And this is the utopian goal of the totalitarian secret police: a look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish, not who is who or who thinks what, but who is related to whom and in what degree or kind of intimacy.

      Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism

  • in this case, facebook is more of a common carrier. blockbuster is the one who broke the law; they just used Beacon as the tool.
    • Cause they me be Chapter 11 in a few more quarters...
    • This isn't exactly true. I was privy to the academic listserv that gave rise to the article in the OP. Here is a segment from the discussion that lays out the argument for both Facebook and Blockbuster's culpability here, from a cyberlaw professor who I'll keep anonymous.

      "This is the reasoning:

      1. Blockbuster is a "video tape service provider" under the statute.

      2. Blockbuster is prohibited from "knowingly disclosing, to any person,
      personally identifiable information concerning any consumer of such
      provider

  • Question for any expert... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This may be a naive question, but I've searched the Facebook developer documents and can't get a straight answer: Do the third-party developers of Facebook apps get access to your profile information?

    For that matter, where does the code for these third-party apps run? Is it uploaded to the Facebook servers (and run from there), or are these third-party developers running code on their own webserver that uses hooks into the Facebook API?

    If I install a Facebook app, does this mean that the developer has acces

    • Re:Question for any expert... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Skidge ( 316075 ) on Friday December 14, 2007 @02:17PM (#21699948)
      Third-party applications run on third-party servers. They have access to most of your profile information, but aren't allowed to save all but the most basic pieces (user id, network id, etc.) because of the Terms of Service. They aren't supposed to store your friends, even. However, any info that you enter in the app is fair game. For example, if you enter the books you've read in this app [facebook.com], they can store that information.

      The question is, do you trust these 3rd party apps to not store your personal info from your profile?

      For reference, halfway down this page [facebook.com] is a decent list of profile information available to developers.
  • Can? Yes. Lose? Who knows.
  • If this is what we know about publicly that Facebook is up to, how long will it be before something surfaces about them collecting DNA or some other ungodly personal info and selling it? Won't someone think of the children?!
  • But does Facebook rent movies now? Otherwise, how does this apply (other than stretching the law to mean what you want to mean)?
  • Can they be sued?

    Yes

    Will Facebook lose?

    I don't think so Tim
  • Anyone who's been on Facebook for more than 5 minutes realizes that when you use these "plug ins," they naturally show up to the public/your friends/your networks. That's the whole point. I honestly think Facebook users understand. Now, if this was on Myspace ...

  • What about Netflix? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Wordplay ( 54438 ) <geo@snarksoft.com> on Friday December 14, 2007 @01:50PM (#21699548)
    I can see my friends' rental histories on Netflix, and I'm sure they can see mine. I probably checked a box somewhere, but I don't think I consented to this sort of thing "in writing."
  • Blockbuster's "new and improved" website is a mess. They have decided to add interactive features on the site. However, each time the mouse points at a movie title, it insists on pulling up everything about the movie as a popup. This significantly slows the browsing experience. The Queue manager is so slow, it is frustrating. And to top this - Facebook widget. One of the lures of using an online DVD rental system is the ability to anonymously procure risque or adult-themed movies without feeling embarrassed
  • I used to laugh at all the paranoid nuts who couldn't transition over to the new forum or site because they didn't allow cookies.

    This was 8 years ago. I guess these people were simply ahead of their time.
  • I think Blockbuster messed up pretty bad setting all this up. They probably should have researched their boundaries before jumping into something like this. As far as Facebook, they'll probably be named as a defendant, but I don't think anything will happen to them. They are neutral and Blockbuster used their services without checking to see if it was totally legal on their end. For example, if a man shoots another man, the murderer would be punished, but the company that made the gun would be clear because

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