When news hit last week that Facebook was publishing user information gathered from third party sites (like ecommerce purchases) and publishing in the news feed, my assumption was it would quickly blow over. Facebook is continuously pushing the envelope with new features, and there always seems to be short term backlash when they try something new.
But it isn’t clear that the new Beacon controversy is going to blow over so easily. First, MoveOn.org has made this their Cause Du Jour and seems hell bent on forcing Facebook to change its policies. Rumors surfaced that Facebook was censoring search results that included the MoveOn.org privacy group (flatly denied, privately, by Facebook).
Today, more news. MoveOn has reviewed early screen shots that we published suggesting that Beacon would include broad opt-out provisions by users. Those features never made it to the production release. MoveOn issued a press release noting the discrepancy and demanding that Facebook implement the original plan.
CNET picked up the story and ran with it. In an update, Facebook commented:
Facebook is listening to feedback from its users and committed to evolving Beacon so users have even more control over the actions shared from participating sites with their friends on Facebook…Facebook already has made changes to ensure that no information is shared unless a user receives notifications both on a participating website and on Facebook.
Notifications won’t be enough for MoveOn and many users who are seriously pissed off at Facebook right now. Facebook’s best move is to make the new Beacon service opt-in only. But that reduces the value of the service to third parties who supply the information to Facebook, and get free links in return.
This story clearly isn’t over.
My friend sign up Facebook and got telemarketing calls. They ask him.
“would you like to buy condom and socks”. No Joke.
Good, its about time Facebook got smacked in the face for doing what they feel like and ignoring the users
This might become, in the analyst’s parlance, a ‘THING’. Conventional wisdom would say at this point that the Juggernaut that is Facebook can’t but become profitable and successful. But, they still have not turned a real profit, and there are others companies in the dad zone (pool?) that were even groomed with Msoft private placements.
It’s never impossible to fail, even spectacularly - this probably won’t happen to Face book, but it could. Most likely, the board would institute draconian changes to save the property.
Oops, ‘dad zone’, Im sure there;s something Freudian there. Hey, can someone edit my post………please?
Oh look! a Facebook story!
Facebook privacy??? Isn’t the whole social networking scene based upon giving up your privacy?
I agree. I can’t believe that they have the audacity to by default publish the activities that I perform away from the site. As an aside, shouldn’t the browser prevent this kind of tracking?
How/do you think this will affect their valuation if its opt in?
Contrary to the slant of the article, which seeks to paint the controversy as an advocacy organization whipping up a fuss over nothing, people are actually concerned about data from outside Facebook being publicized. And MoveOn was hardly the first to publicize this - see for example this discussion of a Beacon ‘jail break’:
http://extratech.blogspot.com/.....k-ads.html
Or perhaps you missed Om Malik’s comments as well?
http://gigaom.com/2007/11/09/f.....ntentions/
Perhaps a better precedent for you to pay attention to would be the 2006 introduction of mini-feeds - which saw Facebook make changes to privacy settings.
The “issue” wont die because there hasn’t been another story for you and the rest of the blogosphere to obsess over. Facebook’s best move is to just wait a week until one shows up.
It wont die because you wont let it.
If one of my e-commerce purchases ever shows up on my Facebook without my explicit consent I will cancel my Facebook account and never look back.
Goldie-
Because its a key issue.
The only legit complaint is that the popup asking for permission to add beacons to your profile can be too fast. It would be a simple fix, yet the complaint is rarely made because everyone seems totally ignorant on how the service is supposed to work.
If Facebook carries out the original plan — for Beacon-enabled sites to request permission to publish your purchases/actions on your Facebook news feed — I can’t see how anyone could have a problem with it. If you don’t want it published just say no. But if your purchases/actions publish on your news feed without any consent on any level then obviously that’s not going to make some people happy. At any rate it’s so easy to delete something from your FB news feed even if you make a mistake or a site’s Beacon feature screws you.
Believing that MOVEON really cares about your privacy is like believing that the earth is flat. All they’re after is publicity. They’re the PETA of politics.
I closed down my facebook account as best I could a few days back. Freakin thing says my acct. is “disabled” and not really deleted. Heh…
This happened to me over the weekend. Facebook used my cookies and published my dads blockbuster queue to my news feed. My dad has a bad taste in movies, I was humiliated.
The story is over for some of us (if it even ever was a story in the first place). Facebook tells my friends that I bought socks today? (You mean there’s a story in there, somewhere?!)
MoveOn’s strategy is brilliant. For zero money, they have managed to generate millions in free publicity and introduce themselves to millions of Facebook users - precisely the kind of people most likely to donate to MoveOn. More analysis here.
Does anyone have any idea where I can find good analytics on Facebook and Myspace, regarding the total number of Musicians, artists, etc on them? This is for a research assignment, FYI.
If you have any clues on where to look, please email me at dtmunir at gmail dot com without spaces.
Thanks
Danish Munir
Hello,
I was wondering if you could answer these 3 simple questions for a school project about blogging. It would be great if you could help me out. THANKS
1. How did you get into blogging?
2. What drives you to blog about something?
3.How has blogging affected you?
Hey, growing pains isn’t just a great 80’s show, it’s something every company has to go through and deal with. How Facebook deals with this controversy will set the tone for future ones. Either face it and fix it or ignore it and hope it will go away.
This is MoveOn’s “cause du jour?!”
Can that group become more irrelevant? They’re making as good a use of time and money as Congress these days…
Here’s the problem with Beacon - “association”.
Buy a book on child care from vendor A, and a tube of KY from vendor B - you must be a child molester!
Buy a book on Islam from vendor A, buy a book on learning to fly from vendor B - you must be a terrorist!!
Buy a book on politics from vendor A, buy a copy of Shotgun News from vendor B - you’re gonna shoot the president!!!
No real connection, just government paranoia - now talk the Feds and Police out of it!
This past weekend I was astonished with how facebook was able to track my hotel room purchase.
I purchased a hotel room from hotwire with…
- A different email than my facebook account
- My legal name, different from my face book account
- All other contact information not even close to my FB contact information
To my surprise about two hours after booking it a friend called me joking about the hotel room I purchased and asking me where I was planning on staying. It appeared in my news feed as something to the effect of “Blake just used hotwire to purchase a great deal on a hotel room”
I went to my privacy settings and facebook said it was set to “notify me first” which it did not do.
Even though I got a laugh out of this more than anything; I found it scary that FB was able to track down my purchase and publically display it to all of my friends.
@Blake. It doesn’t matter whatemail or login you use to buy something. When you log into Facebook it leaves a cookie on your machine. Participating merchants can pick up this cookie and send a message back to FB with your FB ID. See http://herot.typepad.com/chero.....ok-st.html for more details on how this works or http://www.ideashower.com/blog.....ok-beacon/ for how to turn it off.
@ 19 you’re just another troll. stay out of TC!
“But that reduces the value of the service to third parties who supply the information to Facebook, and get free links in return.”
But it increases the value to Facebook’s *real* customers, the users. If they want people to opt-in, either make it unobtrusive or make it so damn valuable that people *have* to opt-in or they’re missing out on something huge.
Note the difference between information collection and publishing. Their policy promises your ability to opt-out of the *publishing* but not the *collection* of data. This means they can still collect it, use it and share it with their advertisers (and publisher partners) — and you have no control over it.
There’s a coming train wreck. Just how far will consumers let media companies go with their profiling activities before they demand at least some level of control and/or user value directly coupled to the effort?
TechFaceCrunch!!!
Come on Facebook, it’s time to move on or else we will.
@16: Isn’t PETA the PETA of politics?
@22: Arrington is very busy running his highly successful website, so you might have to wait a long time for a reply, if he even sees your comment. However, the answers to your three questions are basically the same for all bloggers, so I suggest you do a Yentob and just pretend you interviewed him using these answers.
1. How did you get into blogging?
He had no friends.
2. What drives you to blog about something?
He has no friends.
3. How has blogging affected you?
He never will have any friends.
HTH.
@26: That is absolutely unbelievable. What if you’d rented the hotel room, to, shall we say, meet a lady you weren’t supposed to be meeting? I can just see one of your Facebook friends messaging you “Hey bro, I see you’re taking your secretary to the Lucky Star Motel tomorrow, how about I bring Trish and we make it a four-way?” Not to mention “Greetings. Would you like to make your illicit rendevouz more exciting? Just click here! Regards, Ann Summers and Pfizer.” Followed ultimately by “Your wife wants a divorce. The legal firm of Sue, Grabbit and Runne would like to add you as their friend.”
OMG. Facebook is publishing users’ private information. I just joined a STD dating site named pozgroup.com. If they are partnered with facebook by any kind of way, and facebook publishs my disease to the public, I have to die. I’d better send the site an email to ask them if they are doing so or have such kind of plan.
I have been swapping emails with Facebook’s support about this, and the party line seems to be “we’ll consider it.” Everyone quieted down after they put in some minimal controls over the feed when that whole thing sprung up, and I wonder if the same thing will happen here. They’ll give folks just a little control and pray that it goes away.
Some minimal controls is always desired to run the show.
Facebook applications are getting so annoying that went ahead and put them on block. It was Myspace sometime back and now it is Facebook. Just waiting for it to become Fadebook.
regards
TechBanyan.
Damn, there goes my lofty valuation…$15B…$10B…$5B… back to my mama’s house I go
Somewhere between the “this is no big deal” crowd and “the government is watching us” folks, there is a real concern here. Today, I saw that a friend had purchased a movie ticket on Fandago to Beowulf. My friend says that she had no idea the information would be posted for all to see.
The controls on this system don’t appear to be working well, if at all. We can make up a lot of funny jokes about this, but after the jokes end, we are still left with a huge invasion of privacy. While I’m fairly open on the net, I really don’t want my friends to know that I bought new socks…or underwear, or condoms. I think it’s fine to opt-in on a per-action basis, but this carte-blanche approach is way over the line.
sorry, you’re wrong Mike…this is a non-story, except among tech & privacy geeks. the # of users MoveOn has gotten to petition is laughingly small compared to overall FB userbase, and/or last year’s News Feed backlash petition… which *also* didn’t matter.
yes, there is a larger privacy issue around multi-site cookie info tracking (re: DoubleClick, others) that *is* a worthwhile issue, but that’s not a FB-specific issue.
and yes, FB is being more aggressive about the opt-out vs opt-in policy.
and yes, i expect FB *will* rollout a universal Beacon opt-out for all Beacon partners… which i’m guessing will be adopted by
sigh.
please fix the comment limit…
anyway.
the issue isn’t privacy… it’s whether Beacon makes a difference for FB in terms of monetization.
FaceBook does what it does because they love their subscribers and only has their best interest at heart!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
http://blockthefacebook.com
nipples