For weeks now, privacy experts, bloggers and the like have been hammering at Zuckerman and co. for going a little overboard with ‘Beacon’, until finally today on the official Facebook blog, Mark Zuckerman backtracked.
“I’m not proud of the way we’ve handled this situation, and I know we can do better,” he said.
Think about that for a moment - “I know we can do better” seems to suggest admitting an error in execution, but not in concept. Perhaps Beacon went too far when it began following users even as they left the site, but the real issue is not in wanting to collect as much user information as possible. The vast majority of users already give up a plethora of demographic and behavioral information quite willingly on the site. The bigger problem with Beacon is not just privacy, but the lack of transparency and choice given to the user. If Beacon is going to track me far off the range and even after I’ve logged out, they sure as hell better let me know what they’re doing and give me the choice of accepting or refusing. Yes, a whole lot of us would probably refuse to be tracked around the web, just to raise Facebook’s ad rates (what’s in it for us?), but at the least the ones that do allow it, won’t be blogging to complain about it later.
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