Facebook Caves To Privacy Protests Over Beacon

jcatcw writes "After weeks of privacy protests over its advertising system, Facebook's CEO announced that users now can turn the system off completely. CEO Zuckerberg said 'We simply did a bad job with this release.' Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, called the announcement from Zuckerberg 'a step in the right direction.'"

Comments

Opt In Not Opt Out

[meehawl]

This is a salve. Things like this should be opt in, not opt out. Aside from ethical considerations, it would make the data a lot more reliable in terms of a self-selecting group of people that welcomed Facebook spying on their consumption habits. Presumably, these opt-inners would welcome marketing spam.

Re:Opt In Not Opt Out

[TubeSteak]

"On the opt-out page, it says that you will stop information from being posted to your profile," he noted. "It does not explicitly state that Facebook will stop collecting the information transmitted from third party sites."

Facebook user Tom Hessman added that Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook will still be receiving data from partner sites whether users opt out or not. Nuff said.
Facebook is still going to be receiving info from any site that signs up for the Beacon program.

My guess is Facebook's Beacon is going to be the DoubleClick of the social networking world. Maybe MySpace should get in on the action before Facebook corners the market on demographic information.

Re:Thank god

[Kris_J]

There are two good reasons (one shit each?) that facebook users cared about this. Some activities they might engage in are embarrassing (Porn, donating to Greenpeace, etc) and some activities are supposed to be a surprise to their friends (say, xmas and birthday gifts).

Facebook might look like everyone is an open book, but the information shared and public activities seen are carefully chosen for a variety of complex social reasons. Beacon was completely ignorant of this.

I hope Facebook users aren't buying into the lie

[erroneus]

There will be changes to terms of service or some other nonsense that people will blindly click "yes" to and all of it will be for naught.

There's simply too much money to be made from advertising and selling information to ignore! That's why CableTV started playing commercials even though it was originally sold to be "commercial free."

They can't resist the evil... the greed... "the corporate obligation." Adobe's "ads in PDF" is another fine example of crap they can't seem to resist. And the fact is, while people are sometimes vocal enough about some things, there's enough people out there who don't care enough to complain that nothing gets done.