In addition to the statement we received this past Friday, we have received further communications from Facebook's privacy department, this time directly addressing the silent data transfer to facebook.com. Hi Stefan, Thanks for clarifying your concerns. You can prevent stories from being generated...

[Update 12/03/07 - We have received a statement from facebook, asserting that they do not use or retain any of the data which is received if a user is not logged in or does not consent. It is posted in full here ] As follow-up to Ben's look at Facebook's Beacon system, I began investigating the...