In the ongoing Privacy Boondogle that is Facebook, it seems some hard work by Stefan Berteau at Computer Associates has shown that with respect to Facebook’s Beacon, it really doesn’t matter what your opt in status means with respect to your data.

Om Malik queried some weeks ago when Social Ads was delivered about the possibility of personal data *still* being exchanged, even in the absence of the broadcast of such an exchange via your news feed, for example. That is, was data still being given to Facebook even if you switched off the notification that it be made public?

Did opting out of Facebook’s Beacon (even in its initial incarnation) actually mean opting out of Facebook *telling* everyone what you just did — or actually preventing the information being exchanged in the first place, and therefore not actually *not knowing* what you just did?

Well it looks like there’s a reason why he got such a mealy-mouthed answer, because it turns out that even if you’re *not* logged into Facebook, Facebook’s Beacon Affiliates / Partners / Minions will *STILL* send back information to Facebook!

Why does this matter?

Above and beyond the fact that opting out of “publishing the information to newsfeed” gives the impression that Facebook won’t actually be storing the information of the transaction (not just literally preventing the information being published), or even beyond the technical issue of it being sent to Facebook when you’re not even logged in, its the issue of behavioural profiling on a scale that would make Orson Wells have a heart attack. And yes, I’m quite aware he’s dead.

To wit:

“Facebook just received enough information to tie the activity I took on their affiliate to my individual account, which combined with the social data they already have, such as circles of friends, level of education, communication patterns, and geographic locations, would allow them to profile individual consumer behavior on a nearly unprecedented level of detail.“

Yes, its obviously a marketer’s wet dream, and we could go on to the nth degree and speculate what Facebook might do with said information. Perhaps in the future, for example, with Facebook being “opt out”, and its current Social Ads partnerships potentially being threatened by that, it might end up selling said information in desperation to boost its bottom line.

Outrageous, you might say? Facebook would never do that? It would be a violation of its own TOS?

Well, I’ve got to say that such possibilities aren’t out of the impossible to *me* anymore, because I guess its pretty much in line with the answer that Stefan Berteau got from Facebook with respect to his own findings on the capture of its user data.

You know. A bald-faced lie.

And I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time trusting people who lie to me.

(and with Mark Zuckerburg throwing the (face)book at 02138 for an alleged privacy violation, would this make him a hypocrite?)

{more from IdeaShower as well, who catches a Facebook executive either not actually knowing what’s going on, or inadvertently lying to a blogger}