We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature [Beacon], but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them [the mistakes]. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it. (Facebook blog)
Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has once again apologized to the Facebook community for the company’s controversial Beacon ad system. This, I believe, is the second apology since Beacon was released. And this is the nth time that Facebook has apologized to the community about privacy invasion.
For those who are unsure what Beacon is, it’s a new ad platform, on Facebook. It’s best described as a tool that tracks your actions even outside of Facebook and reports them back to Facebook.
Beacon, part of the company’s new ad platform, tracks certain actions of Facebook users on some external sites, like Blockbusterand Fandango, in order to report those actions back to users’ Facebook friends network.
The idea is to generate advertising that is more effective because it is intricately combined with people’s social circle, so that products and services are promoted in a more organic way via the actions of friends and family. (PCWorld)
I don’t get how it even gets this far, to be honest. There’s a board of directors that I’m sure goes over these things — how do they let these things go through? Don’t they realize that these things can be invasive to their users? Or, perhaps, Facebook is just fully obsessed with turning a profit and justifying their ten-billion-dollar price tag.
Regardless, my patience with FB is growing thin. I’ve thought about cancelling my account, but there are just too many contacts on FB that I’d like to stay in touch with. I think, however, I will remove most of my information from FB. I do currently have some key information on there (phone number, address, etc), and sadly, I no longer trust FB with my information. They’ve shown time and time again that FB users are just a means to sell advertising. FB is no longer about conecting friends; those times are long gone. Instead, it’s about monetizing the beast.
They should really realize how to balance the two — profits and user-satisfaction Sure, it may mean not turning a huge profit, but in the end, they won’t have community backlash like they experience every time a new feature is rolled out.
Facebook is doomed to slowly diminish if it continues it’s course as less about connecting people, and more about monetizing the website. There must be a happy medium.
