Facebook caves to angry users
p2pnet news | Product News:- Angry users have forced Facebook to do an about face on Beacon, a scheme under which it had hoped to market private user data to advertisers, in effect. But this doesn’t appear to have dented its appeal to people who hope to make money out of it.
Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing has followed a $240 million investment from Microsoft with $60 million of his own.
His name sounds like a cash register in operation, doesn’t it?
Anyway, “The 79-year-old Ka-shing is the chairman of Cheung Kong Holdings Limited and Hutchison Whampoa Limited, a conglomerate with 250,000 employees worldwide,” says All Things Digital, going on:
“His businesses are especially tied to Hong Kong, where he has massive investments in telecommunications, real estate, electricity, retail, shipping and the Internet.”
The story says Ka-shing will be able to pump in another $60M even though neither he nor Microsoft will get a Facebook board seat, says the story.
Meanwhile, as of yesterday, 53,000 members had signed the Facebook group ‘Facebook, stop invading my privacy’ petition started by MoveOn.org.
Now, “No stories will be published without users proactively consenting,” says Facebook in a statement, according to the protest site.
Facebook tried to dress the change up as a fix to a glitch.
Now, “If a user does nothing with the initial notification on Facebook, it will hide after some duration without a story being published,” says Facebook, going on:
“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 ‘OK’ to publish or click ‘remove’ to not publish.”
However, “the company did not apologise and it is still impossible for Facebook users to opt out of Beacon entirely,” notes Guardian Unlimited, also pointing out:
“The furore was reminiscent of privacy protests when Facebook first adopted its News Feed, the automatically generated, potted list of updates from your friends on the social network. Thousands argued that the system invaded their privacy, but user pressure relented after the company made some tweaks and it has now become one of the website’s most popular features.”
It works like this, and not only for Facebook:
Instead of treating users fairly and like reasonable, intelligent people, a company disses them, treating them like total morons.
It tries to sneak measures designed to cash in on their supposed stupidity past them, and if that doesn’t work, it partially backtracks, innocently protesting it only has the interests of the people who made it rich, at heart.
And all too often, the companies get away with it.
Ask Apple.
Also See:
All Things Digital – Facebook Nabs $60 Million Investment from Li Ka-shing, November 30, 2007
fix to a glitch – Facebook privacy invasion ‘glitch’, November 29, 2007
Guardian Unlimited – Facebook backs down over controversial advertising system, November 30, 2007
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