Merry Christmas Facebook

Wow Facebook had itself quite a little holiday. After gorging myself on leftover turkey, I was perusing through the meager feeds that made their way into Google Reader today and came across two interesting headlines.

The first was from Ryan Block, of Engadget, titled “Oh, so that’s why Facebook Beacon is so evil” where he was venting a little frustration at how he finally actualy “saw” why people have been so up in arms about Beacon. In his words:

Kind of a duh moment because I followed the whole Beacon controversy and all, but I’ve never used Facebook enough to notice how much of a completely seamless, fantastically engineered, and revolting invasion of privacy Beacon is. I also didn’t realize they’re referring to these Beacon snippets as “stories,” which is a really finessed way of phrasing the reality of the “feature”: information about my personal life that I never explicitly gave you or your partners permission to share or syndicate.

Pretty strong words.

The I saw this one from DavidNYC over at DailyKos titled “Deleting My Bleeping Account, Facebook !“. David was expressing his utter frustration at the difficulty involved in trying to delete his Facebook account. He also says that the main reason he was deleting his account was also Beacon.

As I say above, Facebook’s Beacon service was the key reason for wanting to delete my social networking accounts. The fact that this issue has even got MoveOn up in arms tells you it’s for real. So I suppose it should come as no surprise that the worst offender both hides information on how to delete your account and makes you jump through numerous hoops (some possibly bogus) to actually delete it. (I’m aware that Facebook now claims to offer a universal opt-out, but the company’s constantly shifting stories and Beacon UI have not filled me with confidence.)

But he had a hell of a time getting rid of his account. He actually had to Google and found through that means he needed to email the Facebook support. They had instructions for “Deactivating” your account, not Deleting it.

Deactivation is not deletion - it merely puts your account in limbo and allows you to restore it at a later date. So if you are concerned about, say, the security of Facebook’s servers, deactivation does nothing for you.

After various emails, it took him three days to get his account deleted. He makes an interesting historical reference to a case against AOL years back for making it too hard to cancel the service

A few years ago, AOL was investigated by the NY Attorney General for making life incredibly difficult for customers who wanted to cancel their accounts. AOL was forced to clean up its act and pay a seven-figure fine. Facebook is already on the new AG’s radar, so they’d be smart to change their ways sooner rather than later.

After reading these I had even more of a feeling of the magnitude of how Beacon has affected peoples perception of Facebook. I am just recently familiar with David, but Ryan is up there in the web stratosphere with a rather large following. I will be really interested to see how this all plays out. We all know Mark Z came out with the apology and made some “changes” to the Beacon program, but will it stick. Google has made it this far in large part due to the fact that people “think” they are not evil. I am not sure we can say the same about Facebook.