SALON

Thursday, Dec 6, 2007 2:00 PM UTC

Facebook finally lets users turn off privacy-invading ads

The social network acknowledges its mistake in its plan to send ads to its members' friends.

By

Topics: Facebook, Privacy,

“I’m not proud of the way we’ve handled this situation and I know we can do better,” Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, told members of the social network Wednesday in a blog post. The mea culpa was long overdue.

For weeks, many Facebook members had been protesting Beacon, an advertising plan in which Facebook tapped in to people’s activities on sites across the Web in an attempt to sell to their friends.

Today, finally, Zuckerberg did what critics — including MoveOn.org, which took an early stand in the case — had been demanding: He allowed people to turn Beacon off. He also made clear that when members do turn off the system, Facebook will not store information about your surfing habits that it receives from its ad partners.

As originally conceived, Beacon was a particularly egregious scheme for invading your privacy. Dozens of sites had contracted with Facebook to send people’s surfing data to the social network; your profile would send out little messages to your friends about what you were doing on those sites — telling them that you were shopping on Overstock.com, say, or were cooking certain recipes at Epicurious — as a kind of ad for those sites.

Not only did Facebook not allow people to turn off the system, it also assumed that if you did not explicitly prohibit it from sending messages out from each site in its ad network, you were granting permission. In other words, Beacon was devised as an opt-out plan — or, more precisely, it was plead-out, because getting the system to stop sending messages on your behalf involved a torturous number of steps.

Responding to the critics, last week Facebook fixed the system a bit, making the plan opt-in.

But it remained unclear whether Facebook was making use of your private data anyway — as programmers looked into the plan, they learned that even if you did not specifically opt in to Beacon, Facebook’s partners still sent the social network data on your behavior. That’s why it’s important that Zuckerberg has pledged not to store data about your actions on Facebook’s advertisers’ sites when you turn Beacon off.

In his post, Zuckerberg explains away Beacon’s problems as a failure to “find the right balance” between making Beacon easy and making Beacon safe.

Beacon, he says, began with the best of intentions: “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 in trying to make the system “lightweight” enough that it didn’t get in people’s way, the company overlooked its privacy implications, Zuckberberg says.

Worse, he adds, Facebook dithered in the face of controversy: “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.”

The explanation casts Zuckerberg and his team as well-meaning but bumbling, which is a tad convenient, because certainly a few other, more base considerations than mere incompetence prompted Beacon’s bad design.

For instance, money: As originally conceived, Beacon had one great thing going for it — advertisers loved it. Users didn’t have much choice in whether to send out alerts from corporations, and thus corporations were eager to pitch in to Facebook’s bottom line — which was certainly welcome news for Facebook, which has been groping for some kind of ad model to justify its investors’ huge expectations.

Will the new model hurt Facebook’s ad chances? Maybe in the short run. In the long run, though, it’s possible the company learned something from its misadventure — namely, to respect its members’ rights — that could yield larger gains.

To turn off Beacon, go to your privacy settings page in your Facebook profile.

*******

Here’s a video on the Facebook kerfuffle that I did for Current TV.

Farhad Manjoo is a Salon staff writer and the author of True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. More Farhad Manjoo.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 8 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
FBI reportedly joins Bachmann campaign finance probe
149 points150 points | 4 comments
vote
Jon Karl makes things worse: He regrets “inaccurate” Benghazi email but says his story based on it “still entirely stands.” Really. ABC News?
125 points126 points | 22 comments
vote
“Jodorowsky’s Dune”: The sci-fi classic that never was.
57 points58 points | 14 comments
vote
Doug Henwood: Capitalism Thrives on Class Exploitation
41 points42 points | 4 comments
vote
Paul Krugman’s right: Austerity kills. "In an economy where we’re all in the same boat, one person’s spending is another person’s income. So when the government cuts spending, it reduces people’s income, leading to less business, more unemployment, and a vicious spiral of slowing down the economy."
53 points54 points | 20 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations