Facebook Ads Should Have an Opt-Out

Consider this ad that appeared in the left-hand ad space on friend Jeremiah Owyang's profile page, which he then sent to me:



Yes, about a month ago I did sign up as a fan of Blockbuster's Facebook page. Yet I never told Blockbuster that it could use me to endorse its ads. I'm not a user of Blockbuster Total Access. In fact, as I write this, I'm home sick, I don't have any good Netflix movies here, and there's nothing but garbage on pay-per-view On-Demand or HBO On-Demand, so I even looked up Blockbuster to see if there's one near my apartment, and the closest is ten blocks away (others that were closer have shut down since I last checked). If anything, I'm a little pissy with Blockbuster right now, so I'm surely not going to provide a testimonial for their ad campaign.

So what's the next logical step? I tried to opt out of the advertising. Of course, I can't. The only setting I can change says, "Allow Blockbuster to send Updates to the Updates tab of my Facebook Inbox" - in other words, I can opt in or out of Blockbuster messaging through Facebook. How come I can't opt into or out of its ad campaign? Here's the screen shot of the settings on Blockbuster:

This doesn't just revolve around pages. Jan Van den Bergh also sent me a screenshot of how I provided this kind of endorsement for an application being advertised, and not even one of the apps I'm particularly fond of. I wonder what else I'm endorsing. Facebook, this isn't over.

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