FC NOW: The Fast Company Weblog
December 7, 2007
After the Fallout, A Defense of Facebook Beacon
I haven't been hanging out on Facebook very long or often these days, so I didn't experience the "Big Brother"-ish alerts from Beacon that my colleague Jason Del Rey describes in his post. But, not living under a rock, I couldn't miss all the bad PR Facebook has encountered because of Beacon and its privacy intrusions.
Then today, as I was doing background research/casual Web surfing, I ran across a post, dated from a week ago, on the blog Sexy Widget regarding Beacon. My immediate reaction: "Ha! If only Facebook had positioned this better. The way it's described here, Beacon doesn't sound half bad." To read the post, click here; I definitely recommend it for a different perspective on the matter.
The most salient point that I took from the post was that Beacon doesn't necessarily have to be blatantly commercial. Beside privacy concerns, much of the grumbling about Beacon centered upon what people believed to be incessant shilling of products. But the notifications are useful for other activities on the Web besides e-commerce. Sure, it's about advertising, but so are those notices on the news feed that tell you when someone has added a new app. And I remember when the news feed first came out. Everyone hated it, including me -- I even notified Facebook personally on the matter. But now the news feed is one of Facebook's most acclaimed features, MySpace is copying it, and I have to admit it's pretty clever.
Now, much of this is moot, as Facebook has not only made Beacon opt-in but also enabled users to turn it off completely. But now that I've read some analysis of Beacon's potential, I hope that potential hasn't entirely been quashed by the public's disgust.
Posted by April Joyner at December 7, 2007 12:56 AM | Category: privacy + security |
2 Comments
ADVERTISEMENT
FC NOW MENU
NEWSLETTERS
FC NOW CATEGORIES
FC READS
Privacy is a concern for most people.
The Facebook 'beacon' controversy is just the latest in a growing debate surrounding web privacy / advertising and the use of personal information.
It is a topic that is not going to go away, so it may cast a big shadow over some potentially positive developments.
Careful handling is needed and Facebook haven't done themselves much good by handling the beacon implementation and subsequent fallout so badly.
Facebook's Beacon is a botched plan to begin with. Web surfing is a siloed experience for about 99.9% of the users. If I visit Yahoo, I don't mind if Yahoo stores cookies and recognizes me from visit to visit. But when I visit Amazon, I want absolutely nothing to have to do with that Yahoo profiling on Amazon's site. Amazon itself can do whatever it wants. The very core of Beacon to mish-mash data across the web is a painful misuse of an "idea".
You need to know a couple of endeavors.
1. Behavioral Targeting: from the media side, companies like Revenue Science and Tacoda are already trying to best-guess a user's interests based on cookies and such. This is non-intrusive in every way and only makes inferences based on the knowledge of sites visited. So Beacon is not as innovative or novel as it claims to be.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_targeting
2. Dataportability.org: Efforts like these are a very important step forward. They allow the USER the control to define what kind of data he wishes to share with what website. There are simple tools in a browser (e.g., in a bar) that allow for simple management of this control.
http://dataportability.org
This is a much more open, transparent, and generally wise approach to this whole concept of sharing data across social networks, portals, the next flavor-of-the-month.