Facebook finds a new course for Beacon
TechCrunch is reporting that Facebook has changed course on Beacon, a controversial new data gathering and publishing system. With Beacon, participating Web sites sent data to Facebook that automatically appeared on your profile. For example, if you wrote a review on Yelp or TripAdvisor, the review would appear in your Facebook Mini-Feed and could appear in the News Feeds that your friends see. Other partner Web sites include eBay, Fandango and Overstock.com.
This has caused a couple of concerns:
- Users saw information published that they didn’t necessarily want published. Many people are purchasing Christmas presents and the contents of their orders were put out on their feed, ruining surprises.
- It’s unclear what Facebook does with data that users choose not to publish. Facebook still receives the information from partner sites.
Under the new direction, stories will be sent to Facebook, but will only be published when the user takes an explicit action. That addresses the first concern, but it doesn’t address the second. For all we know, Facebook could be storing that information indefinitely and using that to target ads.
Facebook is all about giving up privacy in exchange for social connectivity. I frequently provide false information when sites ask me about age, gender, etc. Facebook, on the other hand, gets real data because it’s essential to the core function. It’s a tradeoff that I make. But automatically providing transaction-level detail from any partner site is a tradeoff I’m not willing to make.
I’m perfectly happy to have Facebook distribute reviews I write on Yelp. (I was using an application called Yelper to do this before Beacon existed.) But I wouldn’t want Facebook to automatically publish all my reservations on OpenTable (OT is not a partner, this is hypothetical). If I sell an unwanted gift on eBay, I don’t want friends to know about it. Not only do I not want Facebook to publish that information, I don’t want them to get it in the first place.
The biggest problem with Beacon is that there isn’t a clear benefit to the user. It seems like a data grab primarily for marketing purposes. Jason Calacanis’ take on this is well worth reading.
Beacon has a lot of power and can provide a lot more benefit to users than it currently does. I’ll talk more about that in the future.
Update: Om Malik reports that Facebook is deleting information that users choose not to publish.
See also:
- Facebook Beacon 2.0: What You’ll See (TechCrunch)
- Facebook updates Beacon: now truly opt-in (Inside Facebook)
- Feeling Betrayed, Facebook Users Force Site to Honor Their Privacy (washingtonpost.com)
- To Save Its Bacon, Facebook Weakens Beacon (GigaOm)
More on: Facebook, privacy, social networking


















