I'm a fan of Facebook and the concept of social networking and their particular slant on things. I'm also really intrigued what's going to happen as their platform continues to evolve over time.

One thing I'm a little wary of however is invasive advertising and accidental leakage of personal data.

I was initially quite surprised when I logged into my wifes Blockbuster account today and had it offer to send my data to my Facebook profile.

Luckily I managed to hit the "no thanks" button before it did (not that I have any credibility in my taste in movies, but my daughters SpongeBob wish list wouldn't help!)

I did a little bit of searching on the web to see what was going on and discovered I was behind the curve on the outrage that had accompanied this which meant I was able to look at it with less vehemence than some had visited upon Facebook and their partners.

My biggest concern I guess it having Blockbuster and others sharing data without giving me obvious and timely control over the process, especially when the data it's about to share is wrong!

I elect to share my twitter posts, or Last.FM data publicly because there's nothing private and personal. But I do consider my movie and TV viewing or Amazon purchases to be private - not just because I don't see value in sharing them simply to help someone (be it Facebook, Google or Amazon) track data about me but also because I don't like the potential inferences they may make because they don't have context surrounding the decisions. I don't watch SpongeBob, my daughter does. I didn't rent Forever Young with Mel Gibson, my wife did. I didn't buy a book on Renaissance painters for me, it was a gift for my Mum.

If I can control what is shared and when (so I can give it context or filter the irrelevant) then I'd be happy to share data with them. If Blockbuster or Amazon included something like the MadKast "ShareThis" widget or AdaptiveBlue Smartlinks on every line (ideally with a multi-select option for my Blockbuster queue).

If it makes the advertising and personalization more appropriate, just in the same way I love the idea of fine-tuned TV advertising, I'd be happy to share.

For now though, I've added a new AD Blocker filter rule to IE7Pro - all calls to *.facebook.com/beacon/* get blocked ... when I get a bit more granular control I'll be happy to turn the rule off again.

FWIW I don't think Facebook did it to be sneaky or "evil", they simply didn't look at it quite as carefully as they could have and think about the unintended consequences.