Facebook has once again incited a mass user protest. The first mass protest was for the use of the News Feed feature that was introduced in 2006. More than 700,000 users protested their activities being broadcasted to their friends’ pages. The issue this time is the same as the last time, user privacy.
In November 2007, Facebook introduced a new advertising program called Beacon. Beacon tracks users’ action while on other websites and show their purchases made online, over their Facebook page and broadcast it to their friends’ pages. According to a New York Times article, more than 40 partner sites have joined Beacon, sites like Overstock.com, Fandango.com, and Travelocity.com. Sites like these post what the user purchased on their News Feed.
Many users find this form of online advertising intrusive. Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research, said she was surprised to find that her purchase of a table on Overstock.com was added to her News Feed, a Facebook feature that broadcasts users’ activities to their friends on the site. She says she did not see an opt-out box. “Beacon crosses the line to being Big Brother,” she said, “It’s a very, very thin line.”
MoveOn.org Civil Action, the political group, started an online petition Nov. 20 objecting to Beacon and within 10 days, more than 50,000 users signed up. According to another New York Times article, because of this petition, Facebook changed Beacon in early December so that users who ignored the warnings, which showed up for a few seconds while purchasing an item, were considered to have said no.
That same New York Times article mentioned that in December Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, wrote a public apology, in the form of a blog post on Facebook, after weeks of criticism from members, privacy groups and advertisers. “I’m not proud of the way we’ve handled this situation, and I know we can do better,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote.
While Mr. Zuckerberg is sorry that Beacon was greeted with so many complaints, Facebook has no intention of removing Beacon completely. Just as in 2006 the News Feed was protested and then accepted by most Facebook users, so too will Beacon be accepted. At least, that’s what Facebook says will happen. “Whenever we innovate and create great new experiences and new features, if they are not well understood at the outset, one thing we need to do is give people an opportunity to interact with them,” said Chamath Palihapitiya, a vice president at Facebook. “After a while, they fall in love with them.”
When Facebook first unveiled Beacon, it surprised many users. Beacon’s function and its features were not explained as clearly as it should have been. According to the December New York Times article, Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said Mr. Zuckerberg should have explained Facebook’s full advertising and data collection program to users. “The user needs to decide how their information is going to be used, whether it’s going to be used for targeting at all, which advertisers have access to it and whether Facebook has the right to collect and analyze it,” he said. “Facebook is saying it is a safe place for you to share your innermost secrets; what’s not being told to users, is that they are selling those secrets.”