Is Facebook’s Beacon a massive breach of personal privacy?

MoveOn.org definitely thinks so:

Online activist group MoveOn.org is poised to announce a campaign targeting Facebook’s “Beacon” advertisements, which post information about users’ activity on partner sites (movie rentals, purchases from online retailers) onto their friends’ News Feeds. According to MoveOn representatives, the organization considers this to be a “glaring violation of (Facebook’s) users’ privacy,” and has launched a paid ad campaign on Facebook, a “protest group” on the social-networking site, and an online petition to encourage the company to allow users to opt into the program at their own volition.

And there’s more interesting coverage at Silicon Alley Insider:

Although we can’t imagine why MoveOn can’t find something better to do than complain about Facebook, we do note the speed with which 1) Facebook responded to MoveOn’s complaint, and 2) 2,000 Facebook users signed up to support MoveOn. And we don’t blame them. We already hate the idea of bombarding friends with lists of the crap we buy. The fact that Facebook will only let us opt-out of that bombardment on a case-by-case basis (at the virtual cash register at third-party sites) is infuriating.

I’m not sure if I think that MoveOn is right; I have no illusions that what I buy or rent online is anywhere near private information. If Facebook wants to reproduce that in my newsfeed - fine. Maybe someone will get some value out of that.

I have actually never tried to “tend” my feed. It is a stream of what I am doing and occasionally what I am thinking. It wouldn’t really be representative if I started pulling things out of it.

However, I think Henry Blodget over at the Insider is dead-on in calling for Facebook to make Beacon 100% opt-in. The problem is that Facebook is unlikely to listen because they got away with it once before: the news feed.

Everyone who was on Facebook when the newsfeed was first rolled out remembers the backlash that happened all over Facebook: it was invasion of privacy, ridiculous, you couldn’t opt out…

And Facebook kept with it and eventually people settled down and lived with it. So Facebook learned: people will eventually shut up about their privacy as long as you don’t give them an option to opt-out.

And the opt-out in Beacon is about the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard of. You can only opt-out at individual, third-party sites, when you’re checking out? This reminds me of where the plans to destroy Earth were “on display” in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

On display? the plans were in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’

The problem is that this time around it’s really a much bigger issue to many people, and I’m not convinced that Facebook can successfully downplay the fact that they’re broadcasting people’s purchasing habits. There’s a reason that stores with member cards (Costco, QFC, Safeway, etc…) have to tiptoe around the data they collect about what their customers are purchasing.

What you buy is an entirely different set of data than what you post on someone’s wall, or what applications you add. Facebook could alienate a lot of people here.

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