Breaking: Facebook Updates Beacon
Posted by Nick O'Neill on November 29th, 2007 8:37 PMFacebook has just announced that they will be updating their Beacon system. Stories will no longer be published “without a user proactively consenting.” According to Facebook here is how the Beacon changes work:
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.
Users will have clear options in ongoing notifications to either delete or publish. No stories will be published if users navigate away from their home page. If they delay in making this decision, the notification will hide and they can make a decision at a later time.
Clicking the “Help” link next to the story will take users to a full tutorial that explains exactly how Beacon works, with screenshots showing each step in the process.
Facebook has also stated that they are making the notifications more visible. The fact that stories are no longer published by default is a great first step. For me this is almost the same as a global opt-out since your friends won’t automatically be notified. That means Facebook won’t be ruining Christmas (or Chanukah or any other holidays) for anybody. The main issue is that still remains is that they store your shopping data even if they don’t notify your friends.
This information is extremely valuable for helping them advertise to you. What really strikes me as odd is that other e-commerce providers would agree to this system since this information is extremely valuable to them. Ultimately, there is a lot of overall value gained for advertisers by this new system but it definitely has tested the limits of user privacy. Do you think these new changes are sufficient?
Update
To view more about Facebook Beacon, check out the Facebook Beacon FAQ over on the Facebook site.
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Facebook seems to be changing Beacon to opt-in, but in a screwy way:
http://www.allfacebook.com/2007/11/breaking-fac...
"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."
If they actually do it that way, it's good as far as privacy goes, but I think it still shows they don't get it.
They will definitely satisfy the requirement that nothing gets shared until a user has taken a specific action to choose to share it, and that's great. However, I suspect that when people first encounter this, their initial reaction will likely be paranoia. Huh, wha?? Where did that come from? How did Facebook get this information? etc. As a result, a lot more people will think it's creepy and say no.
Facebook should be building a system based on enticing people to choose to participate, and see it as a positive feature to adopt, rather than a negative feature to stomp on. This change would be a partial step in that direction, but I wonder why they wouldn't go all the way. All I can think of is that they really don't get it, and don't understand why people have reacted the way they have.
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