Facebook’s Beacon social advertising app turns off users
A few weeks ago a friend emailed me an FT article about Facebook’s Beacon social advertising app/strategy. The feelings then were mixed: the promise to advertisers was great, but would users really be happy with the invasion of privacy.
Techcrunch explains it nicely
“Beacon is a social form of advertising that shares your purchases or other actions you take on an advertiser’s site with all your friends on Facebook through their News Feeds. What has privacy advocates up in arms, and advertisers skittish, about Beacon is the way it seems to be spying on you as you surf the Web and then, on top of that, reporting what you just did to everyone you know.This objection was doubly true when Beacon was being forced down every Facebook member’s throat whether they wanted to be tracked this way or not. And it was the main reason that MoveOn.org made killing Beacon its Cause Du Jour. Since then, Facebook has addressed most of the initial concerns by wisely forcing people to deliberately and repeatedly choose to participate. But there are still some serious issues with the way the whole system works technologically.
According to one security engineer’s analysis, Beacon partners transmit data to Facebook in bulk about members who visit their site. This is true even for those who opt out of Beacon by clicking on “No Thanks” when asked if the data can be shared with Facebook. The data is sent anyway.”
Here is a great article by Sam Sethi (Blognation) that just about sums it up from the users’ perspecive. Its all well and good having a great advertiser story, but if your users all dissappear your story counts for nowt.
A related article on Techcrunch is here
3rd Dec–> Its all kicking off!!! Here’s the latest from Mashable, more advertisers flee Facebook
4th Dec–> And more from Mashable here