You can’t enjoy a service such as Facebook without realizing that, at a certain point, one way or the other, you will have to quit your old habits in order to adjust to new ones.
Highly announced, the advertisement for Facebook came to a disaster in terms of PR. Beacon, a facility that monitored the activities of Facebook members and turned them into public information, proved to be much too intrusive.
Following numerous protests, Mark Zuckerberg, the famous genius behind Facebook found himself in the position of publicly apologizing, the advertisers that initially were part of the system decided to silently leave, and the future of Beacon looks uncertain.
Who, Where and What went wrong? First of all, Facebook. Beyond the technical issues such as “Beacon should have been opt-in or opt-out”, what happened only goes to show that the management of Facebook hasn’t got any clue about its own users.
“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.” says Zuckerberg in his blog.
When you’re dealing with a 56 million people community, you don’t think or suspect, you have to be sure. Facebook, starting with Zuckerberg, only had to do market research or polls or whatever else they wanted before presenting themselves in front of the advertisers with the new platform.
On the other hand, Zuckerberg’s blog refers to Beacon as an error of implementation.
“The problem with our initial approach of making it an opt-out system instead of opt-in was that if someone forgot to decline to share something, Beacon still went ahead and shared it with their friends. 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. I'm not proud of the way we've handled this situation and I know we can do better.”
Honestly, if this was all that Zuckerberg understood from this crisis, then we all have a problem, as Beacon could be on the verge of being reborn in one form or another and we might end up in the same situation we are in now. Who can assure us that the system doesn’t monitor more than we are told? Who decides what is to be known about our online lives? What are the limits for this monitoring? And in the end, what are the limits of our privacy online?
Facebook faces a situation where it has to prove that it isn’t just an online toy, but instead that it has a viable business, capable of moneymaking. And how else could they do that but by selling data on its own members? No matter if we refer to activity monitoring or targeted commercial, it’s the same thing. Programs such as Beacon try to find out as much as possible about us.
The Beacon crisis goes to show that the beginning of social-networking communities radically changed the concept of online privacy. In the end, we are all responsible for the Beacon crisis, because once again we are a step behind technology.
We were naïve enough to believe that, in an environment where our lives are more online than offline, someone wouldn’t take advantage of the situation.
In a digital world as ours, information is the most valuable resource and knowing as much as possible about the consumer is every marketer’s dream. Considering all that, the social-networking communities are veritable gold mines.
The Facebook – Beacon experience proved once again that we are not prepared for a digital life. We don’t know exactly how we will defend our right to online privacy and it seems that only when someone pushes these boundaries we realize that we need virtual regulations in order to defend our right to safety and existence, just like real life laws.
However after the Beacon experience our online lives will not be the same.