Zuckerberg Apologizes For Beacon Ad Feature

Facebook.com founder and CEO Mark E. Zuckerberg issued a public apology Wednesday morning following a volley of complaints brought on by the new Facebook Beacon advertising feature, announcing that users can now choose to disable the program.

“We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them,” Zuckerberg, formerly a member of the class of 2006, posted on The Facebook Blog. “We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it,” he wrote

Facebook Beacon, which was introduced in early November, allows affiliated Web sites to send information about users’ activities to their Facebook friends. When a user makes a purchase on a variety of sites including Overstock.com, Blockbuster.com, and several other online retailers, Facebook displays details about the transaction in their friends’ “News Feed.”

Zuckerberg wrote on the blog that the social networking site “missed the right balance” of privacy and efficiency when implementing the Beacon feature. Due to the automatic flow of information between Facebook and its affiliates, users were previously unable to control which pieces of information were sent to their friends. Many users only became aware of the feature after Facebook began to broadcast holiday gifts and other personal purchases.

Earlier this week, under pressure from online privacy activist groups and displeased users, Facebook altered the Beacon program so that information from affiliated sites would only by used if the user consented each time a purchase was made.

In his apology this week, Zuckerberg stated that Facebook released a new “privacy control” allowing users to completely disable Beacon—a step he described as “the right solution” to the company’s previous mistakes.

“Facebook was already a privacy nightmare, so I definitely don’t like that they were able to send out our information without telling us,” user Kristine E. Beckerle ’11 said.