Big Ideas in Facebook: Privacy vs. Marketing

From the Financial Times:

Privacy advocates declared victory yesterday after Facebook, the social networking website, moved to placate users concerned about the intrusiveness of its new Beacon advertising system.

Changes to Beacon, announced late on Thursday, will allow users to "opt-in" to sharing information through the service, which broadcasts purchases made on outside websites to Facebook users' friends.

This is the second time in a little more than a year that Facebook has been forced to change a new technology after a backlash over privacy. MoveOn.org, the online advocacy group that last week joined critics of the Beacon service, called Facebook's move a "big step in the right direction".

Beacon has proved the most controversial of several new money-making technologies unveiled last month by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's 23-year-old founder.

The technologies represented its most ambitious attempt yet to cash in on the social connections between the site's 50m users.

Under the service, friends of a Facebook user who buys a book on Amazon.com, for example, may see the Amazon logo next to a message about the purchase when they log into the Facebook site. The changes mean that users will now be asked to explicitly authorise the publication of each Beacon message, according to Facebook.

Previously, messages would publish automatically unless a user said "no" to a publication request within a certain amount of time.
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