If love means never having to say you’re sorry, than a $15 billion valuation must mean: push a user-infuriating strategy as far as you can until finally admitting you were wrong.
If you’ve been following the saga (here, here and here), Facebook’s Beacon pushed word-of-mouth social advertising to the very edge: activities that Facebook users took on other sites — including purchases on sites like Overstock.com and rentals at Blockbuster.com — would be broadcast to all of those user’s Facebook friends. To participate, sites only had to deploy a bit of code on their pages.
The fury occurred when Facebook originally defaulted to an opt-out process. If you didn’t explicitly cancel each data exchange as it was happening, your info would be broadcast out. It later back-tracked to make it opt-in, requiring users to agree to have their data shared — but again on a case by case basis. Today, it added total opt-out into its controls. With a single click, users can do away with the data exchange — forever and universally. Wrote CEO Mark Zuckerberg today:
…We missed the right balance. At first we tried to make it very lightweight so people wouldn’t have to touch it for it to work. The problem with our initial approach of making it an opt-out system instead of opt-in was that if someone forgot to decline to share something, Beacon still went ahead and shared it with their friends. It took us too long after people started contacting us to change the product so that users had to explicitly approve what they wanted to share….People need to be able to explicitly choose what they share, and they need to be able to turn Beacon off completely if they don’t want to use it.
So what’s left here? There’s a very good chance that Facebook’s 50 million users will continue to share their online activities (including e-commerce activities) with one another, albeit with greater control. If that’s the case, Beacon still has a chance to be an important step forward in word-of-mouth marketing.
The last time Facebook had a major privacy issue (with the launch of its NewsFeed, which sent on-Facebook updates to friends) once the problems were addressed it become Facebook’s signature feature.
Meanwhile, it may very well be that privacy concerns aren’t a worry for younger users, as pointed out by this blogger. Or that Facebook users didn’t even notice the hubub at all, according to this poll of Facebook users by blog Valleywag:
