Facebook’s sorry over Beacon
Facebook’s notorious social ad system Beacon has made a quick spin from revolutionary to failure. Founder Mark Zuckerberg, who happens to grapple with some privacy issues as well, has decided to allow members to turn off this ad permanently.
“We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it,” Zuckerberg said.
Even though Facebook made some significant changes last week in light of privacy issues, the members feel that is not enough. According to SFGate.com, even advertisers like Overstock.com are pulling out from this once promising yet blatantly invasive system.
Other social networks should learn from this debacle and never ever underestimate the power of mob when making big decisions. More importantly, a bigger issue is at stake here.
According to Kathryn Montgomery, a communications professor at American University, we are still in the early fluid period for new digital media culture. Perhaps a formal privacy policies should be enacted specifically for the growing online communities.
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