Facebook Beacon Ads Continue to Provoke Uproar and Objections
Facebook may have overestimated how acceptable their new Beacon ads would be for members. But it is one thing for members to decide voluntarily to reveal private, personal information and yet something else for Facebook to enable the commercial exploitation of such information. David Utter reports on the backlash:
One-time online darlings in social networking have begun to feel the dizzying dehydration of the morning after a really great party. Pushback from several quarters may leave the typical past college age person questioning the sanity of being on such sites.
Facebook has been in a running battle recently with activist group MoveOn.org over use of the Facebook Beacon. That feature of Facebook posts a note to one’s online profile whenever the individual makes an online purchase at a merchant participating in Beacon.
MoveOn accused Facebook of originally planning to permit people to permanently opt-out of Beacon, but removed that function at the last minute.
“Facebook should explain why they chose at the last minute to put the wish lists of corporate advertisers ahead of the privacy interests of their users,” said MoveOn’s Adam Green.
The article continues. Vindu Goel poses the question: is this business as usual or a disaster that Facebook has on its hands.
Is your life an open book if you use Facebook? It sure seems like it. It’s giving me the heebie-jeebies. I’m working on a column about the topic, and I’d love to know what you think, either via blog comment or email.
The current uproar is over Facebook’s new Beacon application, which gives online retailers the power to tell all you Facebook friends what you just bought through your News Feed. Some of the sites give buyers a short time window to opt out of the information sharing, but users have complained the opt-out feature is barely noticeable.
Liberal activist group MoveOn.org is leading a protest on Facebook against Beacon, and members of the protest group topped 20,000 as of Sunday. (For a good analysis of all the issues, check out Josh Catone’s excellent post at Read/WriteWeb.)
Facebook’s response so far is troubling. Basically, the company says sharing information with your “friends” isn’t broadcasting it to the world, so it’s not really an invasion of privacy.
The article continues. Clearly the exposure the Facebook Beacon ads are receiving is not what the company and its advertisers had hoped for.