Facebook backs down on Beacons
Huh, well it turns out that Facebook backs down - it couldn’t ride out the media on it’s most recent beacon “feature”. I’m honestly kind of a little surprised - it seemed to me like the sort of thing that was big noise in the blogger world but very little noise in regular people’s world and that a week later a new macbook mini would be announced and the blogoweb would move on and the issue would be forgotten. Thankfully, it wasn’t and it didn’t - perhaps because no macbook mini was announced… hm…
A lot of the problem was that no one at Facebook was saying anything on the topic. I suspect that, like me, they underestimated the tenacity of this problem - they were hoping it was the topic du jour and it would just blow over. It’s definitely good news that they now offer a global opt out (as they did in the original version of the product) and of course everyone has their take on it. FSJ chalks it up to cluelessness and lack of a moral compass at Facebook. Joe Duck accepts the apology at face value. And Techcrunch thinks Zuckerberg saved face with his posting.
I think it was ridiculous that they removed the global opt out. The whole issue didn’t need to happen at all - the majority of people on Facebook aren’t going to go to the privacy settings find it and opt out - so they should have just left that in place and sidestepped this whole issue. By removing that capability and adding in the mammothly screwed version of opting out on a website by website basis they opened themselves up to a world of PR hurt. Their gamble that it would blow over hurt them even more by drawing an ever increasing amount of press on the problem.
Sadly, for Facebook at least, I think that it brought the eye of the matrix onto their goings on at a time when they are trying to actually make some money off the site and thus are beginning to introduce new features that people may potentially not like. Their whole new ad platform and helping Facebook apps spam you are getting more scrutiny as a result. Oh, poor Facebook. It’s going to be tough to actually try and live up to that $15billion valuation.
So have you opted out of the beacon? Do you even care?
PS Opting out simply involves clicking on the “privacy” link in the upper right corner and then clicking on the “External Websites” link - you are given the options on that page. The 3rd party information, though, may still be making it into Facebook’s database so if you have real deep privacy concerns check out this piece on how to prevent Facebook from even receiving the 411 on what you’re buying. I’d probably do it because it’s easy except for the fact that it involves another Firefox extension and I do not want to give FF any quicker access to molasses land.
