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Facebook is feeling a little broken over its unsuccessful attempt to invade the privacy of its members.

The New York Times reported Mark Zuckerberg’s controversial advertising scheme named Beacon is met with several protests from groups like MoveOn.org. More than 50,000 people have signed the petition to modify this advertising system and uphold consumer privacy.

The new ad system is a sly version of word-of-mouth marketing. When users who are logged into Facebook visit a participating site, their friends can now view those actions through News Feed or Mini-Feed stories.

Given these protests, Facebook agreed to make a very important change – it will now ask for the members’ explicit approvals before they track their online activities.

As posted in the Caucus, here are some other changes:

1. Users must click on “O.K.” in a new initial notification on their Facebook home page before the first Beacon story is published to their friends from each participating site. We recognize that users need to clearly understand Beacon before they first have a story published, and we will continue to refine this approach to give users choice.
2. If a user does nothing with the initial notification on Facebook, it will hide after some duration without a story being published. When a user takes a future action on a Beacon site, it will reappear and display all the potential stories along with the opportunity to click “O.K.” to publish or click “remove” to not publish.

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