Zuck apologizes for Beacon — announces a full opt-out

December 5, 2007 | Matt Marshall | Comments |

beacon-problem.jpgFacebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, smarting from the public pounding the company took for the ad feature it released last month that critics said violated user privacy, has written a public apology.

Significantly, he announces an option for full opt-out from Beacon, which is new. [Update: When we first tried it out this morning, the opt-out wasn't working clearly. The company has since fixed it, and it's working fine.]

Excerpts from his blog post:

“We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it…

…When we first thought of Beacon, our goal was to build a simple product to let people share information across sites with their friends….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…Facebook has succeeded so far in part because it gives people control over what and how they share information.

..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.

See image below for the opt-out feature.

beacon-image.jpg

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Matt Marshall is editor and CEO of VentureBeat. Follow him on Twitter at @mmarshall, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • Jin
    "full opt-out" how very clever...
  • sweet beacon-on-fire image there. nice job :)
  • gigi
    Has no one noticed that the opt-out policy allows you to opt out of having your info/activities sent to Facebook? "These settings only affect notifications on Facebook..." So facebook still gets a ton of valuable market information. Why is no one in outrage at the companies volunteering to share usage with Facebook and demanding that they also have an opt-out program to opt out of the data sharing ?!? Hello, Yelp? Epicurious? Blockbuster? Overstock? NYTimes?
  • Dave
    This "apology" was more harmful than anything because it exposes Mark for being either extremely slimy or extremely gullible:

    "At first we tried to make it very lightweight so people wouldn’t have to touch it for it to work."

    Are you kidding me? This is sleaze-talk for "we were trying to sneak it in and not let users know what we were up to."

    "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."

    Lesson 1 with privacy involving THIRD PARTIES: Always make it opt-in. This is like setting all new free webmail accounts to receive spam by default and putting the burden on users to opt-out.

    Sorry, Zucky, but it doesn't work that way. You would think a multi-billion dollar valuated company would know better.