The ad system unveiled earlier this month by the social-networking
site Facebook is the latest target of the advocacy group MoveOn.
MoveOn launched an online petition on its own website and on
that of Facebooks against Facebook’s “Beacon” advertisements.
Beacon is an advertising platform that tracks member transactions
on third-party partner sites and transforms them into product/service
endorsements. The endorsements are then inserted their friends’ “news feeds.”
Beacon currently has 44 participants, including Fandango,
eBay, LiveJournal, and Blockbuster so if you are a Facebook member and if you
have bought, auctioned or rented an item on these sites, everyone in your list
will be notified in a matter of seconds.
Of course Facebook members are automatically opted-in to the
program and they are able to opt out but only on case-by-case basis. That
means that for example you must opt-out for each of the 44 participants, but take
a minute to imagine how much time you’ll spend opting-out for, let’s say, 200
sites.
In its online petition MoveOn called Facebook’s Beacon “a
huge invasion of privacy”.
Also MoveOn.org claims that instead of giving its users the
option to opt-out Facebbook should give members the possibility to opt-in.
"Facebook says its users can 'opt out' of having their
private purchases reported to all their friends. But that option is easily
missed," according to MoveOn. "And even if you do 'opt out' for
purchases on one site, it doesn't apply to purchases on another site—you have
to keep opting out over and over again."
In response to MoveOn’s actions, Facebook issued a statement
saying MoveOn "misrepresents how Facebook Beacon works". "Information
is shared with a small selection of a user's trusted network of friends, not
publicly on the Web or with all Facebook users."
Facebook’s Beacon is part of the ad platform unveiled this month, which platform allows the companies to build their own pages
on Facebook for connecting with the consumers they target, spread their
marketing messages and to gather insight information into the users’ activity
on Facebook.
In fact, there are already ad-systems that work in a similar
way to Facebook’s ad platform. The so-called behaviorally targeted ads use
cookies for anonymously monitor and track the web sites that the users have
visited. Then the behavioral ad networks will then send those users the
specific ads in which they are most likely to be interested in based on the
sites the user has visited.
The behavioral targeting market is set to increase to $3.8
billion by 2011, according to analysts.
