Facebook's Beacon May Have Broken the Law

IIRC this law has amusing origins. During Robert Bork's confirmation hearings, the press reported that he'd rented some porn videos. Congress then rushed through a bill with amazing speed to prevent the same thing happening to them.

You can generally be sure the laws will provide a level of privacy sufficient to protect politicians. You may not be able to get privacy in the sense of anonymity (as public figures, politicians don't have it anyway), but it's likely to be illegal, for example, to record phone calls secretly, lest people who have illicit dealings with politicians record theirs.

Here's a post from Netflix's Community Blog that's relevant:

http://blog.netflix.com/2007/08/why-there-is-no-directory-of...

Facebook seems to be racking up lawsuits at a pace set to break Microsoft's record.