Facebook Forced To Make Changes To Beacon Utility

Facebook’s gotten some major flack for its controversial Beacon utility. The addition was made to the network some weeks ago, and since then the company has been forced to contend with a barrage of less-than-sparkling reviews from tech critics, frosty feedback from annoyed users having witnessed their product consumption choices writ large upon their pages and RSS feeds, and a loud and all-encompassing uproar from the privacy rights advocacy space.

And as of Thursday afternoon, the social network reversed course. Well, maybe not so much a reversal. More like a track back of sorts, in which it admitted error, and promised to do things right from this point forward.

But is there at all a "right way" to operate Beacon? Is it little else than a fairly harmless plug (as in ads) machine that is essentially a marketer’s wet dream turned reality, something that can be manipulated without much thought or worry? Or is it inherently an invasive presence in network users’ lives?

Maybe a little o’ both?

Yes, essentially it is naught but a way to see what your friends (and “friends”) are buying, and vice versa. (Think Amazon-like recommendations, only the algorithm is replaced with people you know.) Yet it’s got a bit of a sneaky stench to it. A stench that seems to elicit the question: “If the marketers know that much about you, what else do they know?”

No, no, we’re not making room for conspiracy theories here or anything of that sort. Governments/corporations know enough about you already. They don’t need Facebook’s help finding out what the hell it is that you prefer as far as toiletries and clothing and godknowswhat. They’re quite privy to all those bits of info. Marketers only want to see more people buy more of that stuff, and they’ve seen Facebook’s Beacon as a way to achieve that objective.

Unfortunately, such back-door collaboration isn’t making too many end users happy. Some Facebook users have complained seeing spoiled gift surprises. Others have protested that things they’d ordinarily assume to remain personal and private have been made fodder for public scrutiny.

As a result of such disputes, the party Facebook and its corporate partners have been enjoying has been cut short - somewhat.

BusinessWeek claimed earlier this week that Facebook contemplated changes to Beacon in the face of opposition by groups like MoveOn.org, a public policy collective that amassed 40,000 petitioners requesting a “scaling back” of Beacon. They urged the social network’s administrators to “turn off the system unless users explicitly (state) they want to share” their purchase histories and so forth.

(40,000 may seem rather quaint in comparison to Facebook’s membership as a whole, but hey, word spreads pretty fast on the Web. Small can go big in seconds these days.)

Today the NYT reports that Facebook has indeed retreated, saying "that it would not send messages about users' Internet activities without getting explicit approval" to do so.

It’s quite interesting to think how, just a few months ago, Facebook seemed in the opinion of the majority like it could do no wrong. Here it is now, standing as a prime, glowing example of what not to do with concern to individual privacy on the Web.

How quickly the mood seems to have shifted.