Facebook reevaluating Beacon after privacy outcry

Facebook has officially updated its policies with Beacon. The tool isstill around and it's still tracking your web usage on partner sites,but users will now have to OK a request to publish off-Facebook info totheir Facebook feeds before anyone else sees it. If a user doesn'texplicitly grant request or ignores it, then it will not be published.Facebook also says that notifications on the main page of the site willalso be visible so that users can better spot and understand what'sgoing on, according to a statement sent to allfacebook.
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Just weeks after Facebook began rolling out its latest marketing strategy, a tool called Beacon, a backlash is building once again over privacy concerns. Users of the site have been finding their off-Facebook web activitiesâ€”such as purchases at online retailers, reviews at other sites, and auction bids, among other thingsâ€”being broadcast to their friends without their consent. The growing unease has prompted a number of Facebook users to close out their accounts, which is apparently just enough to push Facebook into considering revamping the system to be a little more privacy-friendly.
Beacon offers "trusted referrals" to Facebook partner sitesâ€”the idea is that when my Facebook friends see that I just purchased some shoes from Overstock.com, they'd be more interested in checking out that retailer (and maybe even those shoes) because I shopped there. Or when I leave a review of a business on Yelp, my friends can see that I took interest in that business enough to talk about it, and go to check out Yelp themselves for similar reviews.
The concept isn't a bad one. Businesses love trusted referrals, and generally speaking, people love telling their friends about stuff they've bought. The problem with Beacon, however, is that no one asked any of Facebook's users whether the site could start tracking their non-Facebook activities for broadcast on Facebook.
When Beacon was implemented, there was no announcement to users, and there definitely wasn't any sort of way to opt out. People just started seeing things like purchases show up in their friends' (and their own) activity timelines. In fact, the aforementioned Yelp scenario happened to me. I wasn't upset about it at the time, only confused, since I had never added any sort of Facebook application that would have linked my Yelp profile with my Facebook profile.

Not quite as privacy-invading as a purchase history,
but unsettling nonetheless.

But some people have gotten quite upset. After all, who wants their friends to see that they just bought a pair of buttless chaps online, or an entire laundry list of their holiday gift purchases? Activist organization MoveOn.org began organizing a web petition that encourages Facebook to change its Beacon policies. It also started a Facebook group to support itâ€”just during the writing of this article, I watched the number of Facebook members that have joined the group grow by almost a thousand and cross the 48,000 mark.
Facebook tried to head off the initial backlash by adding a few ways to let users opt out of various parts of Beacon, but that's just the problemâ€”the solutions were not easily discoverable and incomplete. MoveOn has created a slideshow demonstrating some of the feature's shortcomings, which include an opt-out box on each retailer's site that disappears if you don't click on it soon enough and settings on Facebook that have to be set individually for every single partner site. There is no real way to opt out of all parts of Beacon.
In addition to MoveOn's petition, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has announced that it plans to file a complaint about Beacon with the Federal Trade Commission in January, according to MediaPost. The group believes that Beacon violates privacy laws in several states, along with Facebook's SocialAds program that tells someone's friends that they've become "fans" of an advertiser.
In light of all this, Facebook is now reportedly considering a revamp of Beacon, according to BusinessWeek's sources. Changes to the system "could be announced" as early as today, but details on what those changes might include are still under wraps. A spokesperson for the site declined to elaborate on the information, stating, "Facebook is listening to feedback from its users and committed to evolving Beacon."
This isn't the first time Facebook has made a misstep that has resulted in outcries from its users over privacy. When the site first implemented its news feed featureâ€”a running feed of every single change made to your profile, your relationships with people, etc. that is broadcast to all of one's friends on Facebookâ€”there was no way to opt out either, and many users suddenly felt over-exposed. Facebook has since added privacy options to the news feed and some users have embraced the "feature." The same type of acceptance could happen for Beacon, assuming Facebook is able to implement privacy controls that users are actually comfortable with. In the meantime, Nate Weiner at The Idea Shower has posted detailed instructions on how to block Beacon's activities under Firefox.