Facebook Belatedly Decides to Take the Con Out of Beacon
Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, that brilliant and precocious 23 year-old who has grown the social networking website to a paper value of $15biilion, posted on his blog yesterday an apology to Facebook users for the way its advertising program, Beacon, was clumsily introduced.
He writes: “About a month ago, we released a new feature called Beacon to try to help people share information with their friends about things they do on the web. We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it.”
The mistakes he is referring were that Beacon alerted Facebook users’ network of friends when they bought something on other websites, such as Overstock.com and Fandango.com, without giving them an easy way to opt out. The idea behind Beacon is interesting - that people learning what their friends are buying acts as an implicit recommendation for those items - but the fact that it was being done for them by someone else without their involvement, wasn’t so cool. It’s like me fishing in your trash can for your store receipts (you haven’t spotted me yet have you?) and then telling other people what you’ve bought. Not illegal, but certainly a bit creepy.
Mr. Zuckerberg had to be reminded by Facebook users that they didn’t want their privacy abused in this way before he did anything about it, but now he’s contrite so I guess that’s all fine. But, how much damage has he done to the reputation of Facebook as an “open platform,” I wonder? And next time the website is valued, how much less might it be worth as a result?
