Report That Facebook May Cave on Beacon: Victory For Users May Be Nigh

facebooklogo2.gifThe upswell of concern relating to Facebook’s Beacon advertising program, including a campaign from Moveon.org may have been successful ,with BusinessWeek reporting that Facebook is discussing changes to the program that could be announced as soon as tomorrow (Nov 29). Facebook executives are said to “deep talks over proposed changes late into the afternoon on Nov. 28.”

Despite its possible lack of concern to the wider community, Facebook’s Beacon program has become a major issue in the tech community, with TechCrunch readers voting strongly in our poll of November 25 that Facebook’s current practices worry them.

Moveon has previously reported that the ability to opt-out of the program was available in early tests of the program, but strangely dropped when it was fully released.

Facebook indicated earlier this week that it was “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,” so the BusinessWeek story would seem likely to be true.

What form these changes will take is yet to be disclosed, but more importantly it will be interesting to see whether the changes go far enough to appease the growing chorus of anti-Facebook rhetoric.