reDesign

The other day I wrote about viral marketing on social networks by getting users to engage with your products and brands. Facebook Beacon, announced on Tuesday, allows sites such as eBay and Yelp to publish your activity on your Facebook news feeds, automating this process. 44 sites in all participated in the announcement.

This is expanding what many applications already do with Facebook. Applications such as MyFlickr (pictures), Yelper (local reviews), Feedheads (Google Reader), WordPress (blog posts) and others take off-Facebook activity and publish it in your profile and feeds.

With Beacon, when you do something on a partner site — such as write a review, buy a product, win a game — that information gets transmitted to Facebook. You then have the option to publish the information on your Facebook feed. This raises privacy issues. GigaOm and John McKinley offer sharp criticism.

The big question I haven’t seen addressed is what Facebook does with the Becaon data if I don’t choose to publish it. There are brands that people would happily associate themselves with (Timbuk2), others that simply provide utility (Tide) and some that are embarrassing (Preparation H). If I buy Preparation H and tell Facebook I don’t want to publish it, do they still keep track of the fact that I’ve bought it?

With Facebook Beacon, I see the third-party sites being more concerned about the use of the data than users. If I’m Amazon or Netflix, one of my competitive advantages is the database of purchasing habits that I have. Do I really want to give that away?

More on: Facebook