Reports surfaced yesterday, and now we have the official word from Facebook. Users will now have to opt-in to share purchases via Beacon:
Stories about actions users take on external websites will continue to be presented to users at the top of their News Feed the next time they return to Facebook. These stories will now always be expanded on their home page so they can see and read them clearly.
Users must click on “OK” in a new initial notification on their Facebook home page before the first Beacon story is published to their friends from each participating site. We recognize that users need to clearly understand Beacon before they first have a story published, and we will continue to refine this approach to give users choice.
If a user does nothing with the initial notification on Facebook, it will hide after some duration without a story being published. When a user takes a future action on a Beacon site, it will reappear and display all the potential stories along with the opportunity to click “OK” to publish or click “remove” to not publish.
Users will have clear options in ongoing notifications to either delete or publish. No stories will be published if users navigate away from their home page. If they delay in making this decision, the notification will hide and they can make a decision at a later time.
Clicking the “Help” link next to the story will take users to a full tutorial that explains exactly how Beacon works, with screenshots showing each step in the process.
It seems like a win for users, although I’m sure the ramifications of this announcement will be dissected and considered in the hours and days to come. First impressions though: the immediate defaulting to privacy is sure to appease many critics, but the details may still raise some concerns, for example Facebook is still capturing this data, the only difference now is that it wont automatically share it. Will this be enough? advertisers will still be able to tap into Beacon for purchasing preferences and other details based on activity on Facebook so the privacy option is really only skin deep.
(via AllFacebook)
This is good news for all those who had privacy concerns AND a facebook account!
Jon
Seems like Zuck started checking his log files again. This will definitely reduce the attrition in the short term I bet. I think the Facebook attitude overall needs to go back to pre-startup days however. There has been a bit too much commercial influence that seems to be taking away from Facebook’s original values. If people really cared about being bombarded with ads they would simply stick with myspace.
Another exciting Duncan copy-paste-post. And as ParisLemon noted, this will get nice Techmem credit this evening. Erick did it today too so Duncan is rubbing off on him.
What’s the problem with having your shopping tracked. In reality its already being tracked simply by the fact that you used your credit card. Also, if you go to a grocery store that uses the “MVP” card deals then you are being tracked there too. There is no way to avoid having your shopping tracked except using only cash and never shopping at the same place twice.
The opt-in functionality should be on the sites partnering with Facebook. I’d like to see MoveOn.org go off on them to prevent the partner sites from sending personal data without explicit consent of their customers. If this precedence stands we can give up on any expectation of privacy…if there ever was one.
I guess the implication is that opt-out’ers trust Facebook more than they do their friendlist.
Prediction for 2008
Facebook will do another round of financing at a 50% discount and sell out to Microsoft who is desperate for any traction.
Here’s a memo to Facebook.
1) We are in a rescession.
2) The buying power of your audience is hovering between zero and $23k. This equates to high school seniors and college students landing their “job”.
Happy New Year!
Prediction for 2008
Facebook will do another round of financing at a 50% discount and sell out to Microsoft who is desperate for any traction.
Here’s a memo to Facebook.
1) We are in a rescession.
2) The buying power of your audience is hovering between zero and $23k. This equates to high school seniors and college students landing their “job”.
Happy New Year!
#3 Rosa – STFU already! Enough. I hope you hear me or is the bandwagon too f**cking loud?
As far as this news goes, I don’t see any downfall for facebook. In a lot of respects, they are the leader, and as such they try to tap into every opportunity. Obviously, it’s much safer for other players to watch what these guys make a mark and then follow suit, but it’s not innovative. facebook is being innovative!
I can’t see why anyone will opt-in to Beacon….if they don’t, FaceBook will have a serious revenue implications. It’s probably better have a revenue shortfall than piss off your users in the long term.
woo hoo. I signed the moveon.org’s petition on facebook. I hoped it helped.
but I’m sure little ol’ innocent me can trust anything on the internet.
Rosa (#3)
when a company puts out a statement like this where that statement is the key to the story, we print the statement, I make no apologies for that, ultimately its up to readers to decide on the move based on their words.
@Rosa – yeah I was just kidding around with Duncan last night on Twitter, probably should realize those things are public and inflection doesn’t carry over…my bad.
I’ve got no problems with Duncan and think he’s a great writer – when he does get a story from another source he is great about citing it (some other large blogs are awful at this).
I see no problem with copying a chunk of a company release – certainly better than misquoting it!
No beef here, sorry for the confusion.
Duncan,
i support you, man! i hope you can feel the love through the matrix.
sincerely,
angela hayden
art goddess
As I said it before, the social graph has no marketability beyond hype. It is vaporware that will never amount to anything – remember, social graphs have existed for years, as email address books, phone trees, etc. When was the last time you tried to market a product through your email or through a phone tree – just does not work as a consumer facing concept without pissing off a ton of people. The whole idea of Beacon was to eventually measure conversions to better target ads to users (this has not changed) – using the social graph in the background to run algorithms for ad serving can be interesting.
The better model:
1. Focus on selling high CPM ads based on precise targeting on site (already done)
2. Sell ads next to facebook messages based on targeting and message text (ala gmail) – this will also work through facebook mobile
3. Outbound search + keyword CPC (like google) – also bring stickiness to facebook mobile app.
4. Use social graph click-through data to better display higher performing CPC ads to members with similar profiles and within networks (beat google CPC) – coupled with beacon internal information to measure conversions.
The sending of data to facebook may be a violation of privacy policies of many sites (imagine if every purchase you made was sent back to google for example) or better yet, lets say your insurance company heard about every purchase of a dangerous product (like a jetski or motorcycle) a really slippery slope in my opinion. Regardless, facebook will grow organically for many years in targeted display ads, but will never reach high revenue numbers.
i’ve been wondering why all my banned ads on facebook haven’t resulted in sales.
But, for Facebook’s sake, they have allowed me to run two of my ads on “evolve already” monkey merchandise.
It is strictly targeted to liberal women who like evolution and feminism.
Not a single sale.
Whoa is me.
sincerely,
angela hayden
art goddess
Facebook is all about giving up privacy in exchange for social connectivity. I frequently provide false information when sites ask me about age, gender, etc. Facebook, on the other hand, gets real data because it’s essential to the core function. It’s a tradeoff that I make. But automatically providing transaction-level detail from any partner site is a tradeoff I’m not willing to make.
I’m perfectly happy to have Facebook distribute reviews I write on Yelp. (I was using an application called Yelper to do this before Beacon existed.) But I wouldn’t want Facebook to automatically publish all my reservations on OpenTable (OT is not a partner, this is hypothetical).
If I sell an unwanted gift on eBay, I don’t want friends to know about it. Not only do I not want Facebook to publish that information, I don’t want them to get it in the first place.
The biggest problem with Beacon is that there isn’t a clear benefit to the user. It seems like a data grab primarily for marketing purposes. Jason Calacanis’ take on this is well worth reading:
http://www.cala...-their-data-or/
Beacon is the future, MS is a great partner!
http://fakestev...r.blogspot.com/
Watching Facebook open profiles to Google, and then this whole Beacon thing has been really rather odd for a company who’s product was touted/built as a very nice and safe “gated” community where college students could socialize without the fear of “internet predators”(like on MySpace) Hmmm….guess there was a lot more to that open-door policy that allowed all us ‘grups in than just giving us a place where we could act like we’re still in college…
So what was it that Zuckerberg said again when Beacon was introduced? Oh right, he hailed the distribution of peer recommendations as advertising’s “holy grail”. The fantasies of a 23 year old…
I believe (or is it hope?) that this will mark the beginning of the slow and steady decline of Facebook by other networks that do not seek to erode the last shred of privacy we retain.
ISPs already know everything we do online, browser history’s track our most recent moves there, our credit cards retain a record of everything we purchase, mobile phones track our very movements, and CCTV at our places of work and elsewhere capture everything else!
And now Facebook want to tell everyone we know the things we read and buy online? How long before someone decides to begin aggregating all or parts of this data swarm?
Did Facebook run out of ideas? There are many other ways to convey to a group the popularity of a purchase/company other than broadcasting a customer’s loyaty to all of their friends, family and employers.
Let’s just implant RFID chips at birth and be done with it. Madness.
Did anyone see this on SFGate (picked up from Washington Post)?
“Sean Lane’s purchase was supposed to be a surprise for his wife. Then it appeared as a news headline – “Sean Lane bought 14k White Gold 1/5 ct Diamond Eternity Flower Ring from overstock.com” – last week on the social networking Web site Facebook.
Without Lane’s knowledge, the headline was visible to everyone in his online network, including 500 classmates from Columbia University and 220 other friends, co-workers and acquaintances.
And his wife.”
Full text here:
http://www.sfga...0/MNERTLQAQ.DTL
I think Beacon will ultimately fail for Facebook.
This is a good start, but I think I’ll stick to blocking the Beacon service through my Firefox plugin.
@Dheeraj: Beacon’s not hype, vapor ware or a violation of any participating sites privacy policies.
I make the argument on my blog that beacon is not only essentially harmless but will ultimately be a big part of Facebook’s success. Facebook’s brilliance is figuring out that people’s actions as recorded and broadcast in the news feed is what makes facebook so compelling – extending it to 3rd party sites is natural and a huge enhancement of the news feed. Beacon’s going to be huge mark my words.
http://www.sawi...to-love-it-too/
@25 Todd, so what you are saying is that if you bought a book on say “S&M” or “How to build a bomb” from one of Facebook affiliates, it is perfectly fine that that info is broadcasted to all of your friends on Facebook?