First of all, online privacy
isn’t what it used to be. Every revolution or evolution in our online (or
offline) lives comes with a price.
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.
