Beacon: Facebook rudert zurück

Nächster Akt in der Beacon-Tragödie:

Facebook ändert das Vorgehen bei Beacon ein wenig. Respekt zur Geschwindigkeit, andere Unternehmen hätten versucht, dass noch ein paar Wochen auszusitzen. Allerdings reichen die Änderungen noch immer nicht. Bei weitem nicht. Eher erscheinen sie wie Augenwischerei.

Die Änderungen

Users must click on “OK” in a new initial notification on their Facebook home page before the first Beacon story is published to their friends from each participating site. We recognize that users need to clearly understand Beacon before they first have a story published, and we will continue to refine this approach to give users choice.

If a user does nothing with the initial notification on Facebook, it will hide after some duration without a story being published.

Das Tracking ist aber hiermit immer noch aktiv. Heißt, die Daten werden erstmal an Facebook gesendet. Ob man das will oder nicht. Ein generelles OptOut gibt es nachwievor nicht. Es wird aber noch besser.

Weiterhin Kritik an Beacon:

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life – Facebook Beacon is Unfixable:

Which is worse, your friends knowing that you rented Prison Girls or Facebook finding that out without your permission and sharing that with their business partners, without your permission? Aren’t there laws against this kind of invasion of privacy?

schlimmer noch:

Facebook isn’t simply learning about every action taken by Facebook users on affiliate sites, it is learning about every action taken by every user of these affiliate sites regardless of whether they are Facebook users or not.

At first I assumed that the affiliates sites would call some sort of IsFacebookUser() API and then decide whether to send the action or not. Of course, this is still broken since the affiliate site has told Facebook that you are a user of the site, and depending on the return value of the hypothetical function the affiliate in turn learns that you are a Facebook user.

But no, it is actually worse than that. The affiliate sites are pretty much dumping their entire customer database into Facebook’s lap, FOR FREE and without their customers permission. What. The. Fuck.

(Hervorhebungen von mir)

Oh my.

Man behauptet zwar, dass die Daten wieder gelöscht werden, wenn man sich gegen die Veröffentlichung im Newsfeed entscheidet. Aber so richtig überzeugt mich das nicht.

Umair auf Bubblegeneration bringt einen guten Vergleich:

The easiest way to understand what good is, and why it’s powerful, is through the counterfactual.

Why didn’t Google launch a Google Beacon? After all, it has vastly more data than Facebook, and, because it’s Google every retailer, publisher, advertiser etc under the sun would scramble desperately to join.

A Google beacon might transmit details of your searches to your friends, when you click on an ad, for example. The details aren’t the point – the economics are: Google could make a near-term killing via a (bigger, more valuable) Beacon style service.

So why didn’t/doesn’t Google do it? Simple: because, though it makes Google better off in the short run, it makes people worse off in the long run.

Wenn Facebook-CEO Zuckerberg gleichzeitig wegen Verletzung seiner Privatsphäre gerichtlich gegen ein Magazin vorgeht, dann bettelt er schon ein wenig um Spott und Häme.