Facebook's Beacon of Despair

The first time Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of Facebook, got into social networking netiquette trouble with his online friends was back in September of 2006. Power users of the nascent site were aghast when suddenly, every thing they did on Facebook was instantly and automatically fed to everyone of their Facebook friends and even to friends of friends.

Digital natives have no reasonable expectation of privacy and they are a generation with an exceptional number of fame-seekers. Even so, something about the way Facebook fed their every move to the network really bothered them.

Zuckerberg (who is way smarter than the average bear) was quick to jump on the problem and, within a few days, Facebook added a bunch of controls so that users could opt certain aspect of their lives in or out of the news feed.

With things back on track, the company grew at a blinding pace. By October 2007, Facebook reached over 50 million active users, launched Facebook Platform for Mobile and sold Microsoft 1.6% of itself for 240 million dollars. That puts Facebook's current valuation at approximately $15 Billion. (Using the same math, you could value MySpace at $65 Billion, but that's for a different article.)

This brings us to present issue. Just recently, Facebook added a feature (if you can call it that) called Beacon. When users conduct a transaction on a third-party site, Beacon sends the information about the purchase back to their Facebook profile and to the news feeds of all their friends. For example, if you purchase a movie ticket on Fandango.com, your news feed (and the feeds of all your friends) will report the time of your purchase, the name of the movie ticket purchased (with a link to it) and the site where it was purchased (with a link). Sounds great! Doesn't it? This is just the kind of information Jeff R., a freshman at NYU, wanted his girlfriend to see. She showed up at the theater expecting that the two tickets he purchased online were for the two of them. Sadly, Jeff was taking his other girlfriend, Kim W. to see American Gangster. You can imagine how unfortunately this particular evening turned out.

Facebook says there is plenty of notice -- a message supposedly appears on the screen for 20 seconds after your transaction is concluded, warning you that the information is being sent to Facebook. After you log in, there is also a small message at the top of the page. If both messages are ignored, the default behavior is to publish the information.

However -- we had a very different experience at our office. Matt, one of our writer/producers, was not logged into any Facebook account. He created a new Fandango account to purchase some movie tickets using a computer in the office. After he completed his purchase, he saw the Facebook box pop-up --this is not an expected behavior. In fact, in that environment it was both startling and disturbing, especially because it said, "Shelly, this information will be sent to Facebook." Matt said that this experience felt invasive, as if his private information was being broadcast (let alone to the wrong account). Matt told me that he read the dialog box and saw an option to cancel the transmission but before he could click on it, the box disappeared. Not wanting me to think that he was using my Fandango account to purchase movie tickets without my consent, Matt called me and asked me to logon to Facebook. As it turns out I was already logged in from my laptop, but I didn't see the warning message that was supposed to appear in my account.

As you can imagine, the outcry from Facebook users has been loud and fierce. Over 42,000 people have signed a petition at moveon.org against Beacon.

The technical solution to this is probably pretty simple. Just reverse the default so that nothing gets fed to the network unless users opt-in for each specific event. This would, of course, completely destroy any advertising or marketing value to the service, but it would make Facebook users feel much better. I actually think that if there were a universal opt-out button for Beacon, every single Facebook user would immediately do so. But that's just me.

Facebook users are significantly different than MySpace users. Digital natives have seamlessly integrated Facebook into their lives. Unlike the little news feed glitch back in 2006, this particular issue has the ability to truly undermine Facebook's core consumer value proposition. It's one thing to ask someone to join your promotional army. Conscripting them without their consent is something else entirely.

Comments

[Sundialsvc4]

Gee, SolarPowerGuy, I thought I was the only one.

I suspect that this "social networking thing" will implode when the young folks who are doing it get just a little bit wiser; just a little bit more savvy that not all parts of this world society are nice, "friend"ly places to be. There are criminals out there, and "you don't really know who that 'friend you've never met' really is, now do you?"

And also... why do folks think that other folks really want to know what they had for lunch? A better name for such sites would be "narcissa.com."

When there are hundreds of millions of investment dollars being dumped into anything, well, you can get a lot of buzz. But something about this particular "phenomenon" seems paper thin and fake to me, and maybe it's just me, but when I see photos and performances by Mark Zuckerberg, something about him seems terribly strained and forced. I wish him well, and maybe I'm just an old cynic, but it would not surprise me to find that in three to five years the man winds up in jail for some securities-something. I think he knows he's riding a train he can't get off.

[Counterglow]

A certain amount of peer pressure comes to bear when 23 of the 25 people you spend the most time with have Facebook accounts. Last-minute event planning and the like often get taken care of that way.

I found out two people I've known for a long time broke up when one changed their status on Facebook. There it was in front of the whole world before they had a chance for second thoughts or to tell friends in person.

That really creeped me out. Six years of shared life dismissed and sterilized by a stupid little broken heart icon.

[Rooster1980]

If anyone knows specifics about "Beacon," please elaborate. I am a Facebook member and I have been unable to find any evidence of Beacon on Facebook itself, and I have bought a few things recently at 3rd party sites but have not seen any notifications of the sort described.

[SolarPowerGuy]

I first went on-line in 1985. There are thousands of articles written by me archived in Usenet. I don't simply use computers, I also program them. I'm the ad-hoc systems administrator for my own household, and for my extended family.

Thus, I do not suffer from technophobia or shyness. Yet I find MySpace and Facebook to be obnoxious. I've found no reason to use either one.

Mr. Palmer highlighted the loss of privacy that "services" like these entail. I also find the "culture" I've seen on those web sites to be adolescent, trend-gripped, materialistic, and shallow. If adults are using these sites, I don't know where to find them.

But consumerism was lingering only in the background of his article, and I'd like to bring it front and center. Facebook wouldn't continue to exist, if it didn't make money.

I already write letters annually to the Direct Marketing Association, asking them to stop cluttering my physical mail box with junk. Even though my phone number is on the National Do Not Call registry, I still have to screen calls with an answering machine. I spend several minutes a day deleting spam email and educating my spam filters.

I am sick of people trying to turn every waking moment of my life into a marketing opportunity!

While I don't miss the days when the Internet was text-only, I want to point out that those days had some merit. Specifically, Usenet had clear boundaries between commercial and informational zones. If you wanted to shop, you had to "opt in" by choosing to read a "marketplace" newsgroup. People who posted commercial spam in non-commerce newsgroups would have their accounts deleted. Your time, and your bandwidth, were yours to use as you chose. You had more control about what personal information you shared and how. I'd like to see some of that come back again.