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Facebook backtracks on opt-out internet advertising system
Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg has apologised to users of the social networking site about mistakes it made when implementing the Beacon Internet Advertising platform.
The Facebook Ads application was introduced in an opt-out system, which caused problems. For example, users buying tickets on Fandango.com would see a pop-up window that said Facebook would send the information to their newsfeed, with an opt-out tick box. However, if a user missed it it would be published on Facebook anyway.
This angered many users, and the site has now been forced to back down.
Zuckerberg wrote on the Facebook blog: "We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologise for it… 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."
Now Beacon has been changed to an opt-in model, and there is also an option to turn the system off completely.
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SEO News posted on 06 December 2007
