Beacons and Little Details
A few weeks ago, Facebook launched their Beacon feature, which lets you update your Facebook network when you’ve performed actions on other sites. Since then, there’s been a lot of discussion and debate over how the feature works, what the implications of Beacon are, and how it should work.
Here’s the story from our standpoint: We announced Beacon support on both LiveJournal and TypePad as initial launch partners. But we worked really hard with the Facebook team on one really important detail — making sure our implementations are completely opt-in.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this was kind of a no-brainer. We’ve learned over the past few years that you just can’t surprise people about where or when their actions will be shared on the web. If it helps, you can just think, “What if every site on the web implemented the feature this way?”
So, to reassure people who’ve asked, both TypePad and LiveJournal are strictly, truly opt-in for sharing your information using Facebook’s Beacon feature. We think it’s a cool feature that has a ton of potential, especially if you’ve got complete control over it.
4 Comments
Don't you think that it's damaging for Six Apart to be associated with the Beacon feature, already the subject of a MoveOn.org petition with 50K+ signatures? Should you cut ties with it in response to how awfully it's been used?
This sounds like a CYA piece. Are you certain this is all there is to say regarding your involvement?
Kudos to getting the most important part right (that it's not OK to have people opted-in unless they specify otherwise, on a site-by-site basis, as the privacy compromises occur).
So, I'm curious -- what did Facebook have to say about your insistence on opt-in? Were they resistant? Were you the only Beacon participants to insist on this?
The fact that privacy issues were raised by at least one partner (6A) makes it even more unbelievable that FB got it so fundamentally wrong.
Concerned Citizen, we think when our users have this much control over a feature, they can be comfortable with knowing it's only going to do what they decide to let it do.
Joe, I don't know the details about any conversations with Facebook over the issue, but they did ultimately allow us to do the right thing, and that's great.
And walt, I'm not sure that's really you. ;)