A progressive voice of the digital age, we are fighting for our digital freedoms in software, hardware and on the Internet. We watch for corporate abuse as well as promote knowledge and educate people about the dangers our rights currently face such as DRM and software patents. We do this with a focus on the Free Software movement and the ideals presented by the EFF, FSF, ACLU, and the hacker ethic.
Please support our social mission.

*Subscribe to our discussion list (med traffic) here
*Stay updated and get action alerts delivered to your inbox here
*Come to our meetings here .
*Subscribe to our local Boston list here
All of our decisions are made through direct democracy and collective decision making. For more information about us, please go here.
Solidarity

 

Victory: Facebook's Beacon Smashed!

rkamens's picture
Submitted by rkamens on Sun, 2007-12-09 19:33.

I just found out that Facebook has made Beacon opt-out. We pressured them and then they made it each item opt-in and we kept applying our pressure to Facebook and their advertisers until we won. Here is a copy of the blog post from Facebook:
"About a month ago, we released a new feature called Beacon to try to help people share information with their friends about things they do on the web. We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more with how we've handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it. While I am disappointed with our mistakes, we appreciate all the feedback we have received from our users. I'd like to discuss what we have learned and how we have improved Beacon.

When we first thought of Beacon, our goal was to build a simple product to let people share information across sites with their friends. It had to be lightweight so it wouldn't get in people's way as they browsed the web, but also clear enough so people would be able to easily control what they shared. 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.

But we missed the right balance. At first we tried to make it very lightweight so people wouldn't have to touch it for it to work. 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.

Facebook has succeeded so far in part because it gives people control over what and how they share information. This is what makes Facebook a good utility, and in order to be a good feature, Beacon also needs to do the same. People need to be able to explicitly choose what they share, and they need to be able to turn Beacon off completely if they don't want to use it.

This has been the philosophy behind our recent changes. Last week we changed Beacon to be an opt-in system, and today we're releasing a privacy control to turn off Beacon completely. You can find it here. If you select that you don't want to share some Beacon actions or if you turn off Beacon, then Facebook won't store those actions even when partners send them to Facebook.

On behalf of everyone working at Facebook, I want to thank you for your feedback on Beacon over the past several weeks and hope that this new privacy control addresses any remaining issues we've heard about from you.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Mark"

This can be described as nothing else but a complete victory. I'm not sure if Facebook still sees your data (I believe it does) but regardless we have all but killed Beacon. Now that you can completely opt-out, I encourage you to do so at http://www.facebook.com/privacy.php?view=unconfirmed_actions. Facebook can still do some things to change but I consider this campaign closed. Major props and respect to MoveOn, Binary Freedom Activists, and over people who joined the Facebook group.
In Victory,
Comrade Ringo Kamens

»