Users skeptical the move will allay their privacy concerns…
“Just one month after Facebook launched Beacon, a controversial advertising platform — the company has scaled back its plans and humbly apologized for stomping on its users’ privacy…”
San Francisco — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized Wednesday for the popular social networking site’s controversial new marketing program, telling users they can turn it off if they feel that it threatens their privacy.
In a message posted on Facebook’s website, Zuckerberg, its 24-year-old founder, said it had “made a lot of mistakes” in building its new Beacon technology, which sends messages when a Facebook user makes purchases on outside websites.
“I’m not proud of the way we have handled this situation and I know we can do better,” Zuckerberg said in a blog post. “We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it,” he wrote.
Several Facebook users said the announcement comes as a relief that they can now completely turn off the site’s controversial Beacon advertising system, though it is not enough to allay their privacy concerns. The social networking firm has been slammed by a firestorm of criticism over privacy concerns about the Beacon system, which was released last month.
The mea culpa comes as more and more people are depending on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace to connect with their friends and share information about their classes, relationships and hobbies. Advertisers have sought to take advantage of that.
“Beacon has proved the most controversial of several new money-making technologies launched by the social network site last month.”
Beacon, which was meant to revolutionize advertising by allowing users to broadcast purchases they made on outside sites to their Facebook friends, turned out to be many users’ ultimate nightmare. Facebook apparently never considered that sometimes people want to keep their shopping habits to themselves.
Shortly after Microsoft invested $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in the Palo Alto startup last month, Facebook introduced “Beacon,” a highly anticipated “social ads” program.
“Zuckerberg hailed it as a revolutionary way for Facebook’s 55 million users to tell their friends about the items they were purchasing, restaurants they were reviewing and vacations they were planning.”
The crux of the problem was, for instance, Beacon captures data when a Facebook user purchased things on Beacon-affiliated sites (such as Fandango.com or Overstock.com), that information would be broadcasted to the person’s entire network. “This notification happened before the purchaser had a chance to approve it.”
But the program backfired as users complained that they were not aware that the information was being sent to their friends.
“On Dec. 3 the company bowed to pressure from its members and the political organization “MoveOn.org” by making it easier for its users to decline to publish news about their various actions.”
Facebook came under withering criticism from its users and privacy advocates alike when a security researcher revealed that the ad system tracks user activities on third-party partner sites — including the activities of people who never signed up with Facebook, who deactivated their accounts or who were not signed on to the site.
Last week the hot social networking website changed its nascent “Beacon” advertising platform after more than 50,000 users signed a petition demanding that the company not broadcast information about users’ activity on other websites without their explicit permission — to an “opt-in” system to soothe members outraged by what they saw as an assault on their privacy.
Previously, a message would be broadcast to a user’s friends automatically unless the user elected, within a certain amount of time, not to broadcast it. Zuckerberg said Facebook would further tighten Beacon’s privacy controls by allowing users to opt out of the service altogether.
A major complaint about Beacon among Facebook users was that the public messages it produced snuck up on them and were difficult to turn off. Zuckerberg said that was by design—since Facebook wanted Beacon to be lightweight and subtle—and that was a major mistake.
“Now, in a highly apologetic blog posting, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the site would allow users to completely say no to the Beacon product, the centerpiece of its much-ballyhooed Social Ads initiative. He acknowledges that the company erred in launching the product.”
“We were excited about Beacon because we believe a lot of information people want to share is not on Facebook, and if we found the right balance, Beacon would give people an easy and controlled way to share more of that information with their friends. But we missed the right balance,” he said.
“We have made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we have made even more with how we have handled them,” wrote Zuckerberg. “We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it. People need to be able to explicitly choose what they share, and they need to be able to turn Beacon off completely if they do not want to use it.”
“We think Facebook took a huge step in the right direction,” said Adam Green, a spokesman for MoveOn.org. “Our hope is their decision has a ripple effect and sets a standard that Internet users’ rights will be put before the wish list of corporate advertisers.”
“The changes followed reports that advertising partners had also begun to voice doubts about the service, amid concerns that users could find it too intrusive.”
Overstock.com, one of Facebook’s partners, had backed out of the program after receiving customer complaints. It said it plans to monitor the response to Wednesday’s about-face before deciding if it will return.
“We need to feel that the Facebook community is comfortable with these types of promotions,” said Jonathan Johnson, Overstock.com’s senior vice president of corporate affairs. “If they say they are OK with these terms, then we will go back to it.”
Facebook’s retreat marks the second time it has been forced to make changes to a new technology because of privacy concerns. Last year, users protested after it introduced “News Feed,” which allowed users to keep track of their friends’ actions on the site.
“It is certainly a mar on their reputation but on the overall success of Facebook, it is not going to permanently damage them,” said Jeremiah Owyang, a senior analyst at Forrester Research.
At the same time, Owyang said, Facebook will have to tread more carefully now that Google, MySpace and others have teamed up to launch OpenSocial, a program that lets software developers create applications that will operate on a series of sites.
“With Open Social looming around the corner, Facebook needs to take care of their community because soon these other communities will open up with similar features and there will be direction competition,” he said.
Facebook user, Simon Smith, said that he welcomed the move for the global opt-out, but also noted that Zuckerberg still “needs to build trust and talk straight.”
Some of the privacy experts, who have been criticizing Facebook about the intrusiveness of Beacon, said that the company is still not doing enough to protect its users from data collection.
Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said in a statement that “Beacon is just one aspect of a massive data collection and targeting system put into place by Facebook.”
Zuckerberg’s goal, as he explained it Nov. 6, 2007 was to transform it into “a completely new way of advertising online.” He can not simply now do a digital “mea culpa” and hope that Facebook’s disapproving members, privacy advocates and government regulators will disappear.”
Nonetheless, Chester did call the move to provide a global opt out option “a step in the right direction.”
Meanwhile, user Paulette Altmaier noted on the forum that “It is much too early to declare victory. It is not in our interests to have our personally identifiable information aggregated by anyone. An opt-out from publishing is not enough — we want an opt-out from affiliate sites sending anything to Facebook,” she wrote.
Though Facebook users may back off now that the site has responded to their demands, it does not answer the larger question of the trend of Web 2.0 companies using information gathered on their sites for advertising and marketing purposes, said Kathryn Montgomery, a communications professor at American University.
Still, one has to wonder what exactly it would take to silence the Facebook critics. It is a free site, and people use it with the understanding that it is subsidized by advertising sales.
“We are still in the early fluid period for new digital media culture,” she said. “We want (Web 2.0 sites) to be used for the wonderful ways they can be used, but if we let the commercial marketplace swarm over them without any rule for how consumers should be treated, we run the risk of spoiling those spaces.”