Privacy before all by Claudia Sonea

The popular social network Facebook outraged its users with its free tool called Beacon that picks up data on users' activity and sends alerts to their Facebook friends' news feeds. Therefore retreated the tool and expect the users to agree first to employ their wealth of user data to tailor and target advertising messages. Until Thursday users of Facebook had two slippery opportunities to stop its partners from using their names to make referrals. However, they rebelled after they inadvertently revealed to friends the movies they were seeing and even holiday gifts they were buying. So, now what users buy and do elsewhere on the Internet isn't sent to Facebook unless users actively agree. In a corner of the Web browser appears a notice every time a user has an online activity or transaction at a partner site using Beacon and even if it disappears after a while it doesn't act like the user gave consent to share information, but it appears later on. Although some of the tool features were withdrawn in order to avoid the risk of people fleeing Facebook and diminishing its $15 billion value, there still are some kept with the hope that eventually it may grow on people. Moreover, Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook's vice president for product marketing and operations stated that there are still things that people do want to share like a review or a blog or a movie ticket, etc. The statement of Peter Phillips, Fandango's vice president for product development, comes in her support and reveals that many users have bought tickets after seeing their friends feeds. Both Chuck Richard, lead analyst at market research firm Outsell Inc Richard, the Outsell analyst, described Facebook's actions as being aggressive- quickly introduced and without any concerns on risk analysis and planning. By comparison to the ads posted on MySpace, the main rival, the one referred to is mining users' online activity and has not created so many discontents. What will happen? Stay connected and surf the web, you will surely find out.

related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071130/ap_on_hi_te/targeting_social_networking;_ylt=Ai3AAoOUvPZn8Fkc9TwERYWs0NUE

by Claudia Sonea for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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Edited by Zuzana Tylkova