TheSandyWalsh's comments

Yup, that was pretty well it.

No, but there's a market for a wikipedia-style Facebook.

If you are logged into Facebook and simply go to the CNN site you are presented with a list of your friends that already Liked or Recommended that site. This means that Facebook already knows you are watching this page even though you took no action.

Yes, you can remove the item from your news feed, but it also appears in your Page | Info list as well. This can only be removed from the original site (AFAIK).

My concern is that it's getting harder to have meaningful discussions for fear of future ramifications. Abortion? Gay marriage? Stem cell research? Can I only talk about those topics offline now? Can I read online articles on those topics if I'm logged into Facebook without it being tracked?

The way I understand it, if you have the "instant personalization" feature On (and it is by default), when you visit an enabled site, they can request your personal/non-public information to give a better experience. If you turn that feature off, they can only access your public info ... Pages and whatever else you leave open. Again, all this stuff is public by default.

I'd like to hear some backup of this theory though.

The big winner here is Facebook. Comments, likes and all that stuff all make they way back to the Facebook mothership. The external websites may or may not get access to that info.

Sorry, I should have made that more clear. Facebook knows about it. To get the plug-in, the browser has to hit the Facebook servers so all the context has already been passed along. I will edit. Thanks.