How does facebook get that data? My understanding that web stores upload the data to facebook? Which ones? I bought a few items at Amazon, bookpool and BHPhotoVideo just recently and haven't seen any references to FaceBook. Who's participating?

The feature really IS dumb. While I generally don't care for my friends seeing what I buy online, I absolutely don't want my wife to get a notification about the gift I got for her for Christmas.

"full opt-out" in the title is very misleading. They are disabling the mini-feed and newsfeed stories only! FB still gets the info on your browsing/buying habits by default, unless you would click the link to not share the info with facebook every time you make a purchase.

If you're so paranoid, why do you shop at places that would willfully send your information to a site like Facebook?

Don't the partner sites have to reach out and send the information to Facebook, rather the the other way around?

From the article: "If you select that you don't want to share some Beacon actions or if you turn off Beacon, then Facebook won't store those actions even when partners send them to Facebook."

It says it won't "store" those actions sent by the partners. Its not clear if they will "use" that information in any other way.

I'd just like to say that, implemented poorly or not, I respect the idea behind Beacon and understand what they were trying to do. Many people are angry over the privacy issues; few people seem to acknowledge that the root idea is actually pretty good and somewhat revolutionary.

Just like the news feed was, maybe Beacon is just ahead of its time.

news feed was defended based on the increase in usage (hits, etc.) of facebook. I'm guessing usage dropped during this whole experiment - it would certainly have been mentioned otherwise.

As for revolutionary, a lot of apps were trying to do related things - most notably the books apps - you could buy a book that a friend was reading and the app maker would get a cut from amazon. To me, it seems a very small step up from there.

I disagree that it is a "very small step up" from the book application. There's a pretty big problem, I think, with web applications being pretty much unable to communicate with each other or with other types of services. Facebook is attempting to solve that with the most "complete" system created so far, Beacon.

I think we'll see a lot more like it in the future. With extremely good privacy controls, no doubt.

Conceded. Cross-site communication is a problem I had not thought of.

I'm still not sure what their novelty is given how doubleclick's cookies working across different portals were being talked about during the dot-com days. I thought Beacon was implemented using the same technique plus direct http calls.

Is there some deviousness I do not know about?

how about facebook offering an opt-in instead of an opt-out????

I doubt most people (nontechies) even know about this feature and what it does, or they wont find it important enough go and opt-out

this is not good enough they need to do more...

I actually liked beacon too. But perhaps its cause I didn't buy anything; I think that was users' biggest concerns, that their shopping habits were being displayed.

Am I the only one that finds this Beacon "controversy" story very boring?

i actually think Beacon is a great idea, and i really like it. i use gamefly, and when they shipped a game awhile ago, an old friend saw it and sent me a msg, and we reconnected talking about the game that i got.

not anything terribly useful, but neither is facebook really. it's a neat feature though.

for those worried about privacy, my response to these things is always the same. if you don't want people to know about it, don't do it on the internet. why would you sign up for facebook if you dont want your personal information on the web?

also, for those of you still complaining about the latest update to Beacon, he said it right in his post. Beacon will no longer collect data sent to facebook by vendors if you opt-out. thus, they will not continue to collect your data as they have in the past.

A fumble after a fumble... they really need to hire a competent CEO.

Eh, their problem is that they keep making things that are technically cool, without really considering how socially awkward they might be.

I'm sure the news feed stuff was fun as hell to implement for them as coders, and it definitely gave Facebook a defining feature, but they didn't consider the social consequences of automated-stalking.

Reading this makes me wonder if Mark just adapted his apology from the news feed debacle to this instance. I should go find that and do a comparison.

Easy thing to do is just not have a Facebook account. Privacy issue solved!

But the news feed in retrospect has turned out to be a huge success. It seems to me that they just try to push the boundaries and find a balance that everyone is happy with.

At least they're good at saying "sorry, we fucked up". That's more than you can say for most companies.

I'd rate this about a 6/10 on the "sorry, we fucked up" scale. I agree that in a climate where Sony's response to the rootkit thing is normal, any humility goes a long way. This post is mostly sincere and mostly apologetic, but Zuckerberg needs a better editor. It could be streamlined a lot. He'd lost my attention by the second use of the word 'lightweight,' and I knew exactly what he meant.

I'd rather see the poorly-edited version. It gives me confidence that Zuck simply said what he meant, rather than run ten different versions through focus groups to see which one would get the best reaction.

I don't mean he should rely on a focus group or let someone else write for him, I mean finding one or two people that will help him make sure he's saying what he wants to say. There's a lot of room to improve clarity and readability without becoming 'sanitized.'

Sure. I'm not saying that sloppy writing is a necessary condition for candor. But it's a near-sufficient one.

Wait... I thought 22 year olds are perfectly capable of being CEOs?