Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg posted on the company blog last week apologising for missteps with the roll-out of their much maligned Beacon advertising system.
"We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made
even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with
this release, and I apologize for it," he wrote.
Zuckerberg goes
on to apologise specifically for "taking too long" to make the system
opt-in rather than opt-out (where the site assumed no answer to the
Beacon prompt was a ‘yes’ and went ahead and shared information). Last
week Facebook made Beacon opt-in site-by-site, and they’ve added a privacy control that allows users to shut off the program completely.
One thing that can be said for sure about Facebook: even though they don’t always get it right the first time,
they listen to their users and iterate continuously until they hit
something people are happy with. When they first released the newsfeed
and mini-feed last year, users were outraged that their information was
being shared without their control to friends. Since then, Facebook has
included increasingly more fine grained privacy controls that allow
users to control what info gets published. The result? The newsfeed is
often credited as one of the most appealing and important features of
the network.
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