MoveOn.org To Challenge Facebook Beacon

Posted by Nick O'Neill on November 20th, 2007 5:26 PM

Share 14 Comments

Caroline McCarthy has posted a great story about MoveOn.org’s launch of an anti-Facbeook Beacon campaign. The campaign consists of a paid ad campaign on Facebook protest group and an online petition. Just yesterday I was speaking with a journalist who pinged me for more details about Facebook’s Beacon system. He had purchased a new pair of shoes for his daughter at Zappos.com and that purchase was transferred to his Facebook newsfeed. If this purchase had been intended as a gift, his daughter would soon know about it thanks to the new Beacon service.

The biggest contention surrounding Beacon is the default opt-out setting. If you shop at a participating partner’s site, your Facebook account will automatically be notified. You have to then proceed to Facebook where you will have to opt-out of alerts being sent to your firends. If you don’t opt-out, your friends will soon be alterted to your purchase. The same thing goes for a few select game sites on the web where alerts of your gaming activity are inserted into your personal newsfeed.

This is ultimately a test of the limits of privacy on the web. Facebook started testing those limits with the launch of their newsfeed last year which resulted in a PR disaster. Our lives are becoming increasingly trasparent on the web and the real question is where will the line be drawn? We have gone pretty far down the path of transparency but I’m not quite sure that we’ve gone as far as we can go. You can bet that Facebook will be at the forefront, testing the privacy limits of their users.

Announcing The AllFacebook Marketing Conference 2012

Mediabistro Event

The AllFacebook Marketing Conference is coming back to San Francisco on June 28-29. We are proud to announce our second conference that offers a how-to guide for marketing to Facebook’s 800 million users. Special early pricing is available for only $199 until today, so register now. A full agenda will be announced soon. Keep an eye on our event site for more information

14 Comments »

Thanks god, someone started the protest i asked for earlier. I though my voice was not heard, WAY TO GO.

Comment by Ruslan Abuzant — November 20, 2007 @ 2:12 pm

Thanks god, someone started the protest i asked for earlier. I though my voice was not heard, WAY TO GO.

Comment by Ruslan Abuzant — November 20, 2007 @ 3:12 pm

minor corrections sent to your firends – sent to your friendsincreasingly trasparent – increasingly transparentbe alterted – alerted

Comment by daksh — November 20, 2007 @ 4:59 pm

That's a little over the top. Beacon gives you at least one if not two opportunities to decline the message.The first time is on the site hosting beacon and the other is on Facebook itself.

Comment by Clayton Scott — November 20, 2007 @ 5:52 pm

minor corrections

sent to your firends – sent to your friends

increasingly trasparent – increasingly transparent

be alterted – alerted

Comment by daksh — November 20, 2007 @ 5:59 pm

That's a little over the top. Beacon gives you at least one if not two opportunities to decline the message.

The first time is on the site hosting beacon and the other is on Facebook itself.

Comment by Clayton Scott — November 20, 2007 @ 6:52 pm

Nick – see if you can find any stats on the percentage of online purchases which are intended as gifts. I imagine it's a pretty high percentage, so that's a huge amount of data which Facebook will, by default (if the retail partner permits), pull straight into the Newsfeed. And we're getting ever closer to Christmas, too!

Comment by Neil — November 20, 2007 @ 9:16 pm

Nick – see if you can find any stats on the percentage of online purchases which are intended as gifts. I imagine it’s a pretty high percentage, so that’s a huge amount of data which Facebook will, by default (if the retail partner permits), pull straight into the Newsfeed. And we’re getting ever closer to Christmas, too!

Comment by Neil — November 21, 2007 @ 1:16 am

A little clarification on how Beacon works. Before any action is published to your Facebook account, you are supposed to get a "window" that slides up from the bottom right corner of your active browser window. This is called toast, since it pops up like toast. At that point you can opt not to publish the action. But, the "toast" apparently doesn't always work (popup blocking?) and so your action gets published without you knowing it or having the option to suppress it.

Comment by Bar_Code — November 21, 2007 @ 3:28 am

A little clarification on how Beacon works. Before any action is published to your Facebook account, you are supposed to get a “window” that slides up from the bottom right corner of your active browser window. This is called toast, since it pops up like toast. At that point you can opt not to publish the action. But, the “toast” apparently doesn’t always work (popup blocking?) and so your action gets published without you knowing it or having the option to suppress it.

Comment by Bar_Code — November 21, 2007 @ 7:28 am

[...] and contests against social players like facebook, and after the hype around their beacon system (See MoveOn Challenge) revoking some your identity privacy; all i think left to be done is leaving that face thing to [...]

Pingback by Is it time to get off Facebook? - abuZant Web Goodies — November 21, 2007 @ 12:33 pm

Maybe in addition to the "opt-out" opportunities, there should be a "Gift" button that reminds the buyer that the Beacon will announce the purchase, and gives the buyer the option to "hide" the Beacon from specific users. Sometimes people don't think ahead of their actions. We are in such a hurry and there are so many "clickable options" that we get "click happy" just to get through the activity.

Comment by Charlie Profit — November 22, 2007 @ 12:19 pm

Maybe in addition to the “opt-out” opportunities, there should be a “Gift” button that reminds the buyer that the Beacon will announce the purchase, and gives the buyer the option to “hide” the Beacon from specific users. Sometimes people don’t think ahead of their actions. We are in such a hurry and there are so many “clickable options” that we get “click happy” just to get through the activity.

Comment by Charlie Profit — November 22, 2007 @ 4:19 pm

[...] finally, the news that maybe the monetizing application isn’t going so well made the decision a relatively easy [...]

Pingback by I deactivated my Facebook Account. Is LinkedIn next? by Ted Eytan, MD — December 2, 2007 @ 5:41 pm