I see that Facebook has climbed down from what amounted to individual item opt-out to a default opt-out system. Via Nick O'Neill:

Users must click on “OK” in a new initial notification on their Facebook home page before the first Beacon story is published to their friends from each participating site. We recognize that users need to clearly understand Beacon before they first have a story published, and we will continue to refine this approach to give users choice.

If a user does nothing with the initial notification on Facebook, it will hide after some duration without a story being published. When a user takes a future action on a Beacon site, it will reappear and display all the potential stories along with the opportunity to click “OK” to publish or click “remove” to not publish.

Which is cleaner, but I doubt it will make the "we didn't understand the Facebook theory" crowd any happier. I still maintain that there's a simple solution for the people who think Facebook has a huge privacy problem: don't join Facebook.

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