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Facebook’s Beacon hits speed bump

Posted in Advertising, Digital, Mel Varley, Latest reporters' blogs December 3rd, 2007 by Melinda Varley

It was only a matter of time before something went wrong with the seemingly perfect idea that is Facebook and its “Holy Grail” of advertising - there has now been more than 50,000 complaints about the lack of privacy due to the Beacon ad platform.

The new platform seems to have tripped up our growing concerns since the British government lost 2.5 million people’s personal details. It’s fair to say that the public is now even more concerned over their privacy.

Many users have complained over the past week that they were finding out about their Christmas presents. Beacon tracks your friends’ purchases and displays them in your News Feed. Was this the result of Facebook moving too fast to keep its many investors happy?

Facebook is worth a reported £13 billion but doesn’t actually generate much revenue – in fact it hasn’t made a profit since its launch, making other companies keen to take a slice of the site a little sceptical.

The Facebook networking site has long been predicted as being just a ‘phase’ that would eventually die out when something similar but better came along. So in order to nip these criticisms in the bud, the social networking site developed a way to attract not just advertisers but to also connect its users with advertisers - creating a full circle of revenues for all.

I think Facebook has failed to acknowledge some very important issue, some of which have already been filling up the column inches worldwide.

Online is where most people are particularly sceptical and Facebook paved the way for people who we’ve not spoken to in decades to access all our information on our work, education and what we get up to on the weekend.

It almost surprises me that Facebook honestly thought we would want to know what our friends and acquaintances are purchasing. The site has now included an ‘opt out’ feature in the Beacon application, but will it learn from its mistakes in the future or is its desire to turn a profit a greater priority than the users who made the site a worldwide phenomenon that it has become?

To read the news story related to this blog, go to mad.co.uk