Among blogger circles, Facebook has been in the headlines quite a bit lately. Facebook is, of course, the popular social networking site. It has been the darling of techies for awhile, and that was accelerated into nerdy glee when Facebook opened up to third-party social applications. As it’s popularity grew, the obvious question comes: How are they going to make money?
In August, Facebook and Microsoft partnered up. Facebook granted Microsoft access to it’s 9 million users to provide search and advertising listings. Then, in September, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, was spotted in Seattle. He was there to meet with Microsoft executives about a potential large investment by Microsoft in the social networking company. In October, Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook, giving Microsoft minority stake in the company. With that came exclusive rights for Microsoft to advertise on Facebook, including both U.S. and international traffic.
Then comes Beacon. Beacon is the Facebook platform for creating and delivering "socially-aware" ads on Facebook. This does three things:
- Targets ads at Facebook members using data in their profiles such as age, gender, job history, relationship status, etc.
- Allows advertisers to put little widgets on their own sites which allow Facebook users to become endorsers of their product. Endorsing the product will spread to all your friends on Facebook as well as in your personal feed.
- Gathering aggregated profile information and providing it to advertisers so that they know what kind of people are responding to their ads.
Within only a day of the announcement of Beacon, people were everywhere expressing their concerns. What about privacy? Do you necessarily want people to know what soda you drink? Or what movie you rented last night? You can opt out of the system, but it has been reported that finding the opt out takes some doing. It also has to be done separately for each partner site, not as a global option.
MoveOn.org decided to get onboard and fight Facebook on this. Moveon.Org is, of course, most known for being an extremely left-wing political organization – not exactly the kind of group I would think would take it upon themselves to get involved with fighting Facebook. As Moveon.Org spokeman Adam Green said in an interview: "If a college kid rents Brokeback Mountain and some homophobic person on his campus sees that, that could be a real problem."
Bowing to pressure, Facebook made a drastic change in policy. In the beginning, every user of Facebook was in this system and had to specifically opt out of it. In response to outcries, Facebook switched it around, making users opt into the system if they wanted to partake in it. Their announcement reads:
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.
This is an obvious win for privacy advocates, however it is not a done deal. Facebook is still capturing all of this data. It is just not displaying it publicly without your consent.
Shortly thereafter, Coca-Cola announced they were bailing out on Beacon.
“We have adopted a bit of a ‘wait and see’ as far as what we are going to do with Beacon because we are not sure how consumers are going to respond,” said Carol Kruse, Coke’s vice president of global interactive marketing, this morning..“I, like you, certainly understood that it would be opt-in. That’s what I heard before as well as what I heard on the 6th.”
That doesn’t sound good to me. It sounds as if Facebook didn’t do what they said. They led partners to believe it would be opt-in and then launched the program as an opt-out program. How did Facebook get themselves into that one?
Yesterday, it was announced that Overstock.com and Travelocity may both be bailing from Beacon. Then, PC World publishes a story saying that Beacon is also tracking non-Facebook users. Whether you are active on Facebook or not, if you conduct business on a Facebook advertising partner’s site, your activity is being tracked and sent back to Facebook. Facebook responded by saying they delete the data from their servers, but once again, Facebook has been caught with their pants down, contradicting what they said was happening.
All of this is very bad for Facebook. Scoble is also asking the question, "Where the hell is Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook?: Facebook has handled this Beacon launch VERY badly. They have done things differently than they said they would, caused a lot of harm to their company image, and then disappeared and played hard to get with the press. Very bad move.
We once again come back to the question: How are they going to make money? Well, it appears Beacon was a big part of their strategy and they now have egg all over their face as a result. Where does this leave Facebook? When you gain a reputation for abusing user privacy, it is very hard to get rid of that image. People are very sensitive about that issue these days, and Facebook has stomped all over it multiple times in the last month. And no company wants to have news about you coming from the blogopshere, especially when that news isn’t positive. Facebook’s relative silence on this is deafening. They have been responding, but not to the degree that the situation deserves.
As Scoble says: "Admit you screwed up. Take your shots. Look into the camera and say you’re sorry."
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Nobody has to have a Facebook account. You can always opt out if you don’t like it.
So what if someone using a pseudoname is known for drinking Coca Cola or checking out B.F. Mountain?
Oh..and B.F. means “boy friend” and not what you were thinking.
no, you don’t “have” to have a Facebook account. but people who do choose to use Facebook deserve a clear and consistently-applied privacy policy. they also deserve to not have their online activities tracked by Facebook or by anyone else.
what’s really disturbing however is the PC World article (http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140247-c,onlineprivacy/article.html) Facebook, through its “partners” is tracking non-Facebook users. so even if you DO choose to not use Facebook, you may still be tracked by their system. that goes way beyond what any site, social networking or otherwise, should be doing.