Facebook backs down

Social networking site Facebook introduced a programme that sends messages to a user's friends showing what they have bought on selected websites, but members were not happy.

They saw it as an invasion of privacy, especially since opting out of the alerts was not automatic.

Through the actions of internet civic action group Moveon.org Civic Action, some 65,000 of Facebook's 50 million members electronically signed a petition titled "Facebook: Stop invading my privacy."

The petition read: "Sites like Facebook must respect my privacy. They should not tell my friends what I buy on other sites--or let companies use my name to endorse their products--without my explicit permission."

They also, naturally, formed a group on Facebook called "Petition: Facebook, stop invading my privacy!"

On Friday, Facebook backed down. Members will now only use the advertising platform, known as Beacon, if they opt-in.

Beacon is supposed to work like word of mouth advertising or what it calls "trusted referral" advertising, by letting members see what their friends are buying.

Now, Facebook members get a notification asking them to click "OK" if they want stories about their activities at advertisers' websites to be sent to friends via automated news feeds.

Facebook was started by Mark Zuckerberg, 23, who created it while an undergraduate at Harvard. It has become hugely successful, with over 50-million active users. However, now it needs to find a way to make money - and advertising revenue seems the natural way to go.

Beacon was introduced to benefit advertisers, who could track users' behaviour and get "free" advertising through members' referrals.

Facebook, according to The New York Times Online, in an article entitled "Facebook Retreats on Online Tracking" on November 30, 2007, believes members will come to accept Beacon in time, and view it as an extension of the book and movie recommendations they post on their profile pages. The site reported Zuckerberg as saying that Beacon notices are "based on getting into the conversations that are already happening between people," when he introduced the advertising platform in New York on 6 November 2007.

The article also quoted Chamath Palihapitiya, a vice president at Facebook, as saying that initially members hated the news feed feature, with over 700,000 people protesting it. However, Facebook kept it and members came to like it.

"Whenever we innovate and create great new experiences and new features, if they are not well understood at the outset, one thing we need to do is give people an opportunity to interact with them," Palihapitiya was quoted as saying.

"After a while, they fall in love with them."