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The Facebook Beacon Ads Debacle Grows Worse Despite Facebook’s Concessions
By Privacy Maven | December 3, 2007
In the aftermath of the revelation of Facebook’s extreme - and perhaps unprecedented - privacy violations in the proposed Beacon ads network that garners members’ unwitting participation in advertising products and services, Facebook has a difficult challenge. Not just Facebook members and privacy advocates, but even potential advertisers in Facebook’s Beacon ads are skittish.
It only took a few weeks for Facebook to squander the good will of its users on a poorly planned advertising platform. Now Facebook has also reportedly blown it with a few key advertisers, including Overstock.com, Coca Cola and Travelocity.
The situation is up in the air with Coca Cola and Travelocity, as some late minute updates to Betsy Schiffman’s original report indicate. TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld also notes advertisers’ reluctance.as well as the changes Facebook has said it will enact to address privacy concerns.
The backlash against Facebook’s Beacon advertising program just gets worse every day. First, advertising partner Coca-Cola got cold feet over privacy issues. Now Overstock is bailing
from the program, and Travelocity is having doubts. What’s more, all of this lack of confidence from the major advertising partners Facebook launched with is coming after it revised its policy to make Beacon opt-in instead of opt-out.
Beacon is a social form of advertising that shares your purchases or other actions you take on an advertiser’s site with all your friends on Facebook through their News Feeds. What has privacy advocates up in arms, and advertisers skittish, about Beacon is the way it seems to be spying on you as you surf the Web and then, on top of that, reporting what you just did to everyone you know.
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According to one security engineer’s analysis
Yes, debacle indeed. Facebook tries desperately to retool Beacon ads and in so doing, keeps garnering the much-needed scrutiny and skepticism. Can restraints and security measures that protect Facebook members’ privacy be enacted?
Researchers are claiming Facebook’s Beacon online ad system is even more intrusive when it comes to privacy matters than protesters against the technology might have thought initially.
On Friday, Stefan Berteau, a senior research engineer at Computer Associates’ Threat Research Group, published findings that reveal Beacon reports member activities on third-party partner sites even if Facebook users are not logged in, and even if members have declined to opt in to the Beacon program.
“It can happen completely without their knowledge,” Berteau said in his report. “The bottom line is that Facebook is materially misrepresenting the privacy impact of their Beacon program, and presenting users with the appearance of control over their information when in fact they have almost none.”
A detailed report and analysis is on the CA Security Advisor Research blog.
Topics: Privacy and Marketing, Social Networking |