Free Online Services: The Dark Side

Facebook - already in the spotlight as real-life repercussions of digital entries grow - made news in a major way recently. Netizens rebelled against Beacon - the feature intended, says Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, "to let people easily share non-Facebook information with their friends." It turns out that Beacon made big trouble for Facebook, and is a wake-up call of anyone using, or thinking of using, free or cheap online services to store, access or share personal information.

More to the point, Beacon tracks what Facebook members buy on the websites that participate in the program, and then sends this oh-so-private info to your Facebook pals. Problem was, Beacon shared information that Facebook users wanted private, but it was an opt-out system (Facebookers had to click on an option to turn Beacon off) that made this difficult. Even worse, they had to make this choice every time they made a purchase, and the opt-out pop-up often disappeared too quickly to even make the choice.

Facebook has apparently learned its lesson, and has done a web services two-step to set things right: it first converted the system to opt-in, and then added a way to turn Beacon off completely.

The lesson learned: free and near-free online services often bear hidden costs that may not be obvious. When you commit personal information on any free online site, the chances are great and growing that other folks will hear about it. So before you trust your digital life to Google, Yahoo, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, and so on, think twice about sharing your personal information with the world-at-large - without even knowing that you've done so.