Facebook and Privacy

Last week I copied a recipe to my Epicurious recipe box and was surprised to see a popup advising me that the information had been added to my Facebook record. I had only recently opened a Facebook account and, like most users, didn't read all the fine print. I considered closing that account as I really don't want my web surfing habits to be made public - but then forgot about the incident - until today.
Reading a recent blog post on librarian.net I saw this comment:

I explain the word “default” to my sudents often. To people new with computers, the ideas of the comptuers default settings is a little perplexing. Fred Stutzman highlights part of David Weinberger’s post about Facebook where he discusses how Facebook’s default privacy settings are all wrong. Completely and totally wrong. Don’t miss one of Fred’s earlier posts where he discusses how to turn the Facebook Beacon off to stop it from telling marketers more about you than you may be aware of.

What a good idea. I promptly followed the instructions for turning off the beacon and hope that I can surf privately in future.