The beacon automatically posted information to people's walls without their consent. If you purchased jewelry on Overstock, or win a bid on Ebay, everyone would know automatically. The beacon was seen as a major privacy issue as it released private information onto the social networking site. After a class action lawsuit, the sites were required to have the users approval before being published online for all their friends to see.
As many of the partners who were under the impression that the beacon was an "opt-in" service discovered that it was not, they began to withdraw from the program. Facebook adjusted the beacon to be "opt-out" but did not recover any of the partners business.
For Facebook and it's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, it was all downhill from there for the Facebook beacon. In 2008 another class action lawsuit was filed against Facebook and several of the remaining partners. Facebook had to pay out settlements to nearly 20 individuals who filed claims against them for violating the Video Privacy Protection Act, Electronic Communication Privacy Act, Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and many other consumer protection laws.
On September 21, 2009 Facebook officially shut down the beacon and CEO Mark Zuckerberg referred to it as a mistake. Facebook paid out $9.5 million dollars into a fund for supporting privacy and security online as a result of their major mistake.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/081308-facebook-faces-class-action-suit-over.html
http://www.darden.virginia.edu/corporate-ethics/pdf/Facebook%20_A_business_ethics-case_bri-1006a.pdf
This was totally an invasion of privacy, I had something posted on my wall when this happened without my consent also. I hate how when I look up things on Amazon or other websites and somehow I get a pop up or an advertisement on some other website in the side margin, relating to the items I was looking up. Now a days it is impossible to avoid advertising on the internet or even in the real world. Americans see almost 3000 ads every day, and other countries wonder why we consume so much. We get told to purchase something at least 3000 times a day or more.
ReplyDeleteI believe it is dificult to confidently say that we make our purchasing decisions complete on our own, especially since different websites now know what we look for. If there is something that we are debating on whether to purchase, by the time we are finished with our laptop or smartphone, advertisements have made that decision for us. As for the facebook beacon, I also believe it was an invasion of privacy. We should be able to decide what we want our facebook friends to see and what we want to keep to ourselves.
ReplyDeleteIt is compelling that computers are developing a mind of their own. We literally can search the web for any object we take interest in, and the advertising for other websites will contain images and offers related to the search. In some ways it can be argued that this development of "Web 3.0" is indeed making searching more accurate and intelligent. For example, as listed in the MIS book- before, a search for Hilton Hotel in Paris might be confused with images of Paris Hilton. Nowadays, Computers are now becoming smarter in understanding what the user wants. I feel that Facebook's attempt at The Beacon for advertising was a violation of privacy. I fear that future computer advertising will only find more and more loopholes to advertise and list user interest information to other sites.
ReplyDeleteI find the Facebook Beacon to be an invasion of privacy. I would not like to let everyone know the products I bought, especially if I was buying gifts to surprise someone with. Companies want to make money, but the Beacon is too much of an attempt.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree that this was a huge mistake for Facebook considering how many users it has and how popular it is. Many people do not want others to know what they are doing and what they are purchasing online 24/7. In order for these sites to ask permission from us before advertising on our Facebook sites, gives individuals the purchasing power and also the ability to decide who advertises and what they advertise.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the Beacon was a horrible idea. Why would any company think that it would be a good idea to post their advertisement on someone's wall without their consent? That is only going to upset the user, maybe even to the point that they wouldn't buy a product or use the services of that particular company again. In these situations, it is always a better idea to ask permission to post first.
ReplyDeleteThis is fascinating because of the huge invasion of privacy. I still think Facebook targets users in other ways by making public your "like" history. I think that that's almost the same idea as tracking the history of an individual from another website, because businesses are increasingly putting their products and websites on Facebook to attract traffic. So although Facebook may have shut down the activity from these sites and made them unavailable for other users to see, I still think that there are issues with advertising, such as the ability to crawl through your private profile data.
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