This afternoon, Facebook issued a mea culpa and reversed its position on Beacon, making it an opt-in system and adding a global opt out. While this reversal does not address user tracking on third-party sites, it is a positive step for privacy and likely front-page news tomorrow.
The Beacon controversy has been particularly interesting to me because, at its heart, it wasn’t about the users. By comparison, let’s consider the previous major controversy, Newsfeed. Newsfeed was implemented without a soft rollout, without much notice, and most importantly, without privacy considerations. Facebook argued that their position was sound because nothing quantiatively changed with regards to privacy; they failed to realize that privacy is both qualitative and quantitiative. Newsfeed made Facebook, and Facebook friendship feel very different to us, and users reacted en masse. As I’ve documented in the case study, blog coverage contributed to the uproar, but the large feedback vector was a group called “Students Against Facebook News Feed.” At the group’s maximum size, it had over 750,000 users, somewhere around 8% of Facebook’s entire userbase.
This user revolt was quickly addressed by Facebook, leading to a more-or-less agreeable conclusion within a few days. At the time, Facebook was not open-to-all, and while it was covered in the press, it certainly wasn’t the SNS on the tip of everyone’s tongue. In the Newsfeed fiasco, Facebook’s constituency was the agent of change; the event largely registered with Facebook users and watchers, but not the general public.
Fast forward a year and two months, and Facebook again finds itself rolling out a feature with questionable privacy assumptions, Beacon. Beacon is a little different from Newsfeed, though. While Newsfeed was in your face, forcing you to confront privacy issues, Beacon is subtle – to the point that many Facebook users don’t even know it exists. Why? Well, first, you have to use a Beacon enabled site to encounter Beacon, and second, its quite hard to notice Beacon ads as anything special or different from all the application spam in your Newsfeed. I’d argue that a majority of Facebook users don’t know about Beacon, just as most car owners don’t know what their car’s ECM does. It’s not a value judgment, just a reality of technical systems.
In creating Beacon, a product that would clearly fly beneath the radar of a majority of users, Facebook assumed that it could use its bully pulpit to address serious privacy changes. “Use it or leave”, etc. We see these assumptions enacted in the opt-out nature of the system, with no global exclusions. And if the users weren’t even going to really understand the changes, they couldn’t revolt, right? To a certain extnt, Facebook’s users didn’t revolt. There wasn’t a zero-day event like “Students Against Facebook Newsfeed.” There wasn’t viral opposition from users, mass defections, or any other major user-generated protest that appeared on my radar.
Where Facebook tripped up was forgetting that they’re no longer just accountable to their users. Over the past fourteen months, Facebook has morphed from a college students’ website to (in the eyes of the media) a competitor to Google or Microsoft. And while I think that even internally at Facebook they don’t buy that hype, the press and the social/technical blogosphere has made the company item one on their watchlist. In self-fulfilling their 15B prophecy and promoting their ability to change the media, Facebook invited the criticism and scrutiny that comes with such a lofty place. The media spectacle that has been Facebook’s last few months works both ways, it seems.
In arguing that the user wasn’t the agent of change, my main piece of evidence is the MoveOn Campaign. Reaction to MoveOn’s opportunistic petition drive was paltry, at the time of writing only 70,000 Facebook (.14% of FB) users have joined MoveOn’s group. What MoveOn lacked in response, however, they more than made up with media savvy. Through my work with techPresident (and seeing reposts around the web), I was able to see many of the messages that MoveOn sent to its vast contact network of reporters and media influencers. Each message was full of information, comparable coverage, easy-to-soundbite narratives (i.e. Facebook ruined Christmas) and opportunities to interview complainants, etc. MoveOn pushed the issue hard, pounced on new developments, and kept this story alive and in the media.
Couple of caveats. First and foremost, this isn’t all MoveOn’s doing. This was a legitimate story, and many covered it as such. Second, once a story like this gets going, it picks up a life of its own. I will say, however, were it not for the MoveOn campaign, we wouldn’t be where we are right now. Their media strategy simply ran an end-around Facebook’s proposed plan of action in dealing with angry users or A-list bloggers. They were blindsided by all of the media coverage.
As Facebook apologizes for Beacon, one can sense their disappointment in not being able to push Beacon they way they intended. Their product was crafted to take advantage of unsuspecting users, and to that extent they pulled their strategy off pretty well. Perhaps this was their major error; rather than dealing with angry users, they were forced to deal with the media. Through their own machinations, Facebook no longer exists in a world where it can bully users without consequence; as they attempt to keep up appearances of a major company, they will be forced to adopt a front of responsibility. The media is now Facebook’s watchdog, and because of that, Facebook’s in a very new world.
