Thousands of Facebook users were shocked in recent weeks to find their online purchases were revealed to their friends. The social networking site has since softened its new advertising feature, but not before stirring up a brouhaha.
The program, called Beacon, informs Facebook users' friends when purchases are made on certain online retail sites, including Amazon, Zappos, Travelocity and Fandango. In some cases, friends were informed exactly what item was purchased, ruining some holiday gift-giving plans. The group MoveOn.Org Civic Action started a petition, signed by 50,000 protesting the program on privacy grounds.
Under a change initiated late last week, users have to explicitly authorize the publication of each message. Previously, messages would automatically publish unless the user said "no."
Beacon is viewed as an important test of online tracking. Companies like Google, AOL and Microsoft routinely track online behavior and send out ads based on the sites people visit and searches conducted, but Facebook took it to a much more personal and transparent level.
Facebook executives view Beacon as an extension of the type of book and movie recommendations that members routinely volunteer on their profile pages. Beacon notices are "based on getting into the conversations that are already happening between people," founder Mark Zuckerberg said when he introduced the program on Nov. 6.
"Whenever we innovate and create great new experiences and new features, if they are not well understood at the outset, one thing we need to do is give people an opportunity to interact with them," Chamath Palihapitiya, a vice president at Facebook, told the New York Times. "After a while, they fall in love with them."
Some ad execs poked fun at Facebook users who openly share their love lives and drunken exploits.
"Isn't this community getting a little hypocritical?" Chad Stoller, director of emerging platforms at Organic, a digital advertising agency, told the Times. "Now, all of a sudden, they don't want to share something?"
But some of the high school and college-age Facebook users felt a line had been crossed.
"We know we don't have a right to privacy, but there still should be a certain morality here, a certain level of what is private in our lives," Tricia Bushnell, a 25-year-old in Los Angeles told the Times. "Just because I belong to Facebook, do I now have to be careful about everything else I do on the internet?"
While applauding the changes to Beacon, Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research, told the Financial Times that Facebook needs to regain the trust of users and privacy advocates. "I believe some privacy advocates will continue to agitate for the full dismantling of the Beacon program," Ms Li said.
Discussion Question: Do you think Facebook crossed a line in allowing online purchases of its users to be revealed to their friends? Do you agree with Facebooks' management that the sharing of such consumer information will eventually be welcomed by users?