Facebook’s notorious social ad system Beacon has made a quick spin from revolutionary to failure. Founder Mark Zuckerberg, who happens to grapple with some privacy issues as well, has decided to allow members to turn off this ad permanently.

“We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it,” Zuckerberg said.

Even though Facebook made some significant changes last week in light of privacy issues, the members feel that is not enough. According to SFGate.com, even advertisers like Overstock.com are pulling out from this once promising yet blatantly invasive system.

Other social networks should learn from this debacle and never ever underestimate the power of mob when making big decisions. More importantly, a bigger issue is at stake here.

According to Kathryn Montgomery, a communications professor at American University, we are still in the early fluid period for new digital media culture. Perhaps a formal privacy policies should be enacted specifically for the growing online communities.

Originally posted on December 6, 2007 @ 9:49 am

Facebook is feeling a little broken over its unsuccessful attempt to invade the privacy of its members.

The New York Times reported Mark Zuckerberg’s controversial advertising scheme named Beacon is met with several protests from groups like MoveOn.org. More than 50,000 people have signed the petition to modify this advertising system and uphold consumer privacy.

The new ad system is a sly version of word-of-mouth marketing. When users who are logged into Facebook visit a participating site, their friends can now view those actions through News Feed or Mini-Feed stories.

Given these protests, Facebook agreed to make a very important change – it will now ask for the members’ explicit approvals before they track their online activities.

As posted in the Caucus, here are some other changes:

1. Users must click on “O.K.” in a new initial notification on their Facebook home page before the first Beacon story is published to their friends from each participating site. We recognize that users need to clearly understand Beacon before they first have a story published, and we will continue to refine this approach to give users choice.
2. If a user does nothing with the initial notification on Facebook, it will hide after some duration without a story being published. When a user takes a future action on a Beacon site, it will reappear and display all the potential stories along with the opportunity to click “O.K.” to publish or click “remove” to not publish.

Originally posted on November 30, 2007 @ 10:47 am