Freedom to Tinker » Blog Archive » Lessons from Facebook’s Beacon Misstep
Facebook recently beat a humiliating retreat from Beacon, its new system for peer-based advertising, in the face of users’ outrage about the system’s privacy implications. (When you bought or browsed products on certain third-party sites, Beacon would show your Facebook friends what you had done.) Beacon was a clever use of technology and might have brought Facebook significant ad revenue, but it seemed a pretty obvious nonstarter from users’ point of view. Trying to deploy it, especially without a strong opt-out capability, was a mistake. On the theory that mistakes are often instructive, let’s take a few minutes to work through possible lessons from the Beacon incident. To start, note that this wasn’t a privacy accident, where user data is leaked because of a bug, procedural breakdown, or treacherous employee. Facebook knew exactly what it was doing, and thought it was making a good business decision. Facebook obviously didn’t foresee their users’ response to Beacon.
Techdirt offers some additional analysis in an article titled Learning Good Privacy Rules Requires Experimentation.