By Rodney Brown

Are the folks running Facebook evil, or just stupid?

I refer, of course, to the new Facebook “feature” that went into effect yesterday called “Instant Personalization,” which automatically allows third-party websites to tailor their experience to you by pulling personal information about you from Facebook. The company that Mark Zuckerberg built not only installed this feature with barely any notice – you got one alert at the top of your page a couple of days ago when you logged in – it automatically set the default to “allow” any site to gather the information.

Seriously, why do we need any identity thieves when Facebook is practically doing it for them? And it’s not as though this is the first time Facebook has tried to pull a fast one over on its users. As far back as 2007, Facebook tried implementing an advertising platform called Beacon, that, appropriately enough, would broadcast out to your friends whenever you might have purchased a movie ticket or bought some shoes online. After a firestorm of upset user comments about the fact that no one was told about this in advance and there was not even any way to opt out, Facebook had to make it an opt-in program or risk seeing users leave in droves.

The marketing geniuses at Facebook dealt with another user-information problem in 2009 with equal aplomb. It came out through someone’s careful study of the Facebook terms of service that you agreed when you created an account that every piece of content you posted up belonged to Facebook – every picture, every note, every wall post. Facebook’s response was initially the equivalent of “tough noogies.” Again, only after a deluge of bad press and worse user comments did Facebook “clarify” its policy to say that anything that wasn’t a completely public post would never be used for any purposes other than your own social activities. But anything public could be used by Facebook because all that content is still really theirs, you see.

So now Facebook has once again tried to sneak one past its users, and once again it got caught in the shameful beam of their parent’s flashlight. How many mistakes do we give them before we all jump ship? And it’s not that I object to the idea of using my information to better target the ads I am forced to look at anyway (OK, I do, but short of unplugging from the Intarwebs, there’s not much I can do about it), but I strongly object to not being told it is going to happen, and only being given a choice to stop it because someone stumbled on it.

But hey, at least Facebook learned something from the last two times. If you can find the “Instant Personalization” feature, it does have an “off” button. That’s a big step up from Beacon, and it only took three years.