Berkman Fellow David Weinberger has posted some thoughts on Facebook’s Beacon, and he feels that Facebook has got the defaults wrong.
When Blockbuster gives you the popup asking if you want to let your Facebook friends know about your rental, if you do not respond in fifteen seconds, the popup goes away … and a “yes” is sent to Facebook. Wow, is that not what should happen! Not responding far more likely indicates confusion or dismissal-through-inaction than someone thinking “I’ll save myself the click.”
Further, we are not allowed to opt out of the system. At your Facebook profile, you can review a list of all the sites you’ve been to that have presented you with the Facebook spam-your-friends option, and you can opt out of the sites one at a time. But you cannot press a big red button that will take you out of the system entirely.
Weinberger is right on both points; Facebook is giving us the tools to “opt out” but is banking that the technical hurdle will be high enough that many of us won’t. And of course, even if you do opt-out of Beacon, that doesn’t prevent your data from flowing to Facebook (good discussion in the comments on that post). Of course, if you do fully opt-out at the browser level, Facebook won’t get your data – but then your experience will be broken on Beacon-ized sites (Epicurious just hangs and becomes useless if you do anything that requires a Beacon call).
I can only agree that the defaults are not safety oriented and this is bad — but hasn’t such a risk benefited Search engines (who could index without having to ignore sites without robot.txt), or the initial growth of Facebook?
Both cases have irreplaceable benefits, so I would love to have the service try not to have the *defaults* wrong, but the *explanation* right: what we see is clearly irresponsible behavior, but helping users to grow-up would make all these questions much easier to resolve — don’t you think?