Caving in to pressure, Facebook may rework Beacon

Zack Miller — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 12:55:00 EST

Filed under: Internet, Microsoft (MSFT), Marketing and Advertising, Technology

MoveOn.org may get its way. After launching a pretty aggressive campaign against Facebook's new Beacon service, BusinessWeek is reporting that Facebook management may finally be caving in to pressure to change the service. BloggingStocks' Aaron Katsman wrote earlier this week rather critically about MoveOn.org's stance.

The Beacon service allows website owners to "Enable your customers to share the actions they take on your website with their Facebook friends." By just adding a few lines of code to an e-commerce website, for example, purchase information from customers who are also Facebook users could be posted onto Facebook in a move deemed by MoveOn.org to be too much of a privacy invasion.

MoveOn.org's campaign (see it here) focuses on the privacy ramifications of Beacon. "When you buy a book or movie online -- or make a political contribution -- do you want that information automatically shared with the world on Facebook?" says the MoveOn.org website.

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Facebook's creepy Beacon ads put your mouth where your money is

Barry Summerlin — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 12:42:00 EST

Filed under: Consumer Experience, Internet, Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), eBay (EBAY), Marketing and Advertising, IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI), Sony Corp ADR (SNE), Blockbuster Inc 'A' (BBI), CBS Corp 'B' (CBS), Comcast Cl'A' (CMCSA), Expedia Inc (EXPE), News Corp'B' (NWS)

Facebook has had a breakout year -- BloggingStocks probably should have listed the social networking site among our Hot Products of 2007. It sold a small stake to Microsoft for $240 million, and its success with encouraging third-party add-ons forced News Corp (NYSE: NWS)'s MySpace and even the mighty Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) to change tactics. But as Tom Taulli and The Wall Street Journal addressed yesterday, Facebook's stock with privacy advocates is dropping over its über-creepy Beacon targeted advertising method.

On Facebook, you're as private as you are modest. You have the option of laying bare your bookshelf, Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) queue and purse contents for all your friends and neighbors to pan through, or you can leave all that business blank and keep your fancies as mysterious and enigmatic as you are, you unique snowflake. My profile tells users -- not to mention advertisers -- that I like to put on CNBC and dust my marriage-prohibitive record collection. Consequently, I've got E*Trade (NASDAQ: ETFC) and the occasional ironic t-shirt vendor after me, greeting me with animated ads whenever I log in.

By now, web users have learned to deal with e-tailers and ad-serving scripts tracking their behavior, realizing that oft-maligned cookies effectively just save you the effort of typing your password. This is reasonable targeted marketing: I pay nothing for a service, and in exchange, some vendor imagines it got a little closer to a selling me something.

Where Facebook and all the participating advertisers that sail with her cross the icky line is with Beacon. Beacon goes beyond serving up targeted ads -- it takes my purchase information from participating advertisers and broadcasts it endorsement-style to all my Facebook friends, as well as any others in my network who, for whatever illness or boredom, feel like probing my Facebook essence.

Continue reading Facebook's creepy Beacon ads put your mouth where your money is

Facebook's creepy Beacon ads put your mouth where your money is originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Thu, 22 Nov 2007 12:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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