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Ugh. The feature has no purpose besides notifying people you're ignoring or haven't yet gotten around to. Not to mention that it's way too close to OKCupid's design where you can see visitors; I'd like to browse with some semblance of privacy.

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If you're roaming around on Facebook's turf, you should probably keep your privacy expectations low.

Admittedly, and I avoid it as much as possible. But while pretty much everyone assumes that anything they do online will be public, they don't assume that anywhere they go will be public too. Passive browsing has a very strong expectation of privacy and if you dismantle that without strong warnings ahead of time, some people are going to get burned badly.

I can see a usage case especially in the native environment for Facebook -- college students. So, you tell someone, "Hey, remember, you're playing with us in the Frisbee competition tomorrow over in Rochester. Meet me at 9am, North Campus." The next morning before you drive off, you check for messages and they haven't responded, but it's marked as "seen", which is some small comfort -- you still don't know that they woke up in time, but otherwise you can expect them to remember.

It's actually also possible to implement this in email, although the loading of remote images is disabled by default in Gmail. Any email which contains a link can point to a web service which notifies someone, "hey, this page was accessed."

My mail reader has a handy button to solve this case: Reply

Note that OKCupid lets you turn that feature off.

Facebook apparently doesn't let you turn this off.

Don't you have to pay OkCupid to turn it off?

For visitors? Nope. You just have to pay if you want to see your visitors without being seen yourself.

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