Facebook Beacon too much like Big Brother

In 1984, Winston Smith hides from the Thought Police, who use an un-named technology to read the thoughts of the oppressed citizenry. Although not in the same league as Big Brother, Facebook announced today that they were backing down from having an opt-out e-commerce spying system, that reports your purchases to Facebook.

Aside from protestors and the occasional facebooker who found his holiday gifts out-ed to friends and families, Beacon failed for 2 reasons.

1) Lack of transparency

Beacons works by tracking users behavior across multiple site with cookies. Same trick used by many Ad networks, to do behavioral targetting of ads. But many too users were blissfully unaware of this, and with the high degree of media scrutiny on Facebook, it was bound to be seen by some as violation of user's privacy.

2) Lack of participation by major E-tailers

If Ebay and Amazon had been partners in this Beacon initiative, this would never have happened. Who were Facebook's primary web partners in this conspiracy to track user's behavior: also-ran e-commerce websites. As one facebooker commented, what if she bought a used table because it was dirt cheap and her friends found out.

Any opt-out system would have to be introduced with first-rate partners, who would have to be willing to go to bat for Facebook: essentially sell the idea to their users and address privacy concerns. Imagine, if Amazon had been a partner in Beacon, and had introducted additional controls in Amazon to protect their user's privacy. The message would have been, yes it is opt-out but our trusted partners care about creating the best possible experience. Instead Facebook Beacon became the proverbial industrial fishing net, bringing up plenty of trash and catching the occasional dolphin. Hopefully, facebook learned from this expensive lesson in how to introduce big and controversial ideas to the world.