reDesign

Bowing to strong criticism of Beacon, Facebook has added a universal opt out to Beacon’s data collection. This comes after making the publication of Beacon data opt in last week. The post on Facebook’s blog came from Mark Zuckerberg, the first time he has publicly addressed Beacon’s privacy issues.

When we first thought of Beacon, our goal was to build a simple product to let people share information across sites with their friends. It had to be lightweight so it wouldn’t get in people’s way as they browsed the web, but also clear enough so people would be able to easily control what they shared. We were excited about Beacon because we believe a lot of information people want to share isn’t on Facebook, and if we found the right balance, Beacon would give people an easy and controlled way to share more of that information with their friends.

But we missed the right balance. At first we tried to make it very lightweight so people wouldn’t have to touch it for it to work. The problem with our initial approach of making it an opt-out system instead of opt-in was that if someone forgot to decline to share something, Beacon still went ahead and shared it with their friends. It took us too long after people started contacting us to change the product so that users had to explicitly approve what they wanted to share. Instead of acting quickly, we took too long to decide on the right solution. I’m not proud of the way we’ve handled this situation and I know we can do better.

As I said the other day, finding the right level of friction when collecting user data is tricky. Among the scenarios that I outlined, this probably falls at 5 1/2. The partner sites are still sending the data to Facebook, but if you select the universal opt out, none of it will be published. Zuckerberg’s statement clearly says that the data will be deleted:

If you select that you don’t want to share some Beacon actions or if you turn off Beacon, then Facebook won’t store those actions even when partners send them to Facebook.

I continue to believe that Beacon has a lot of power. Now that participants are consenting to publication of the data, it’ll be interesting to see what kind of new uses occur.

Update: Om Malik is parsing the phrase “Facebook won’t store those actions.” He writes, “So essentially he’s saying the information transmitted won’t be stored but will perhaps be interpreted. Will this happen in real time? If that is the case, then the advertising “optimization” that results from “transmissions” is going to continue. Right!”

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