Facebook: A Beacon or a Stalker?

So, last week my friend Shannon got a great deal on a rental car from Hotwire. I know this not because Shannon is in the habit of calling me up and regaling me with tales of her automotive hiring practices, but because I found out about it on my Facebook page. There it was, a notification reading:

Shannon got a great deal on a rental car from Hotwire”

This being me, I automatically wrote a snide message on her Wall, thanking her for the thrilling update. Except it wasn’t from her. She didn’t even know it was there.

Welcome to Beacon, the eye-gougingly silly new advertising scheme from Facebook, in which, on certain partner websites (like Hotwire) the fact of your purchase will be sent to Facebook who (kind of them, this) will then tell all your friends. You have to opt-out of the scheme in order to maintain your privacy and – here’s where Beacon drifts from eye-gougingly silly to mind-bogglingly awful – there isn’t even a universal opt-out. You have to opt out each. and. every. time.

(I know. It’s like your best friend just turned out to be a member of the Khmer Rouge or something.)

As the (somewhat aptly named) Peter Kafka points out over at the Silicon Alley Insider, Beacon, as it currently stands, is:

…just plain creepy, even by the always-on, nothing-to-hide standards of today’s web users.”

He’s not alone in his unease. A poll in today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription only) shows that the vast majority of Facebookers don’t wanna share:

If Facebook could tell your friends what you do on other sites — buying movie tickets, clothes, etc. — when would you want to share that information? Of the 200 respondents, 1.5% chose always, 30.5% chose often, sometimes or rarely and 68% chose never.”

I certainly bloody don’t and I honestly think that the marketing industry may be preparing to shoot itself massively in the foot with directed/personalised advertising. There’s useful, like, say, updates from a travel website about cheap flights on a route you fly regularly. And then there’s stalking, which is what Beacon is. We talk constantly about treating the consumer like an individual, but that doesn’t necessarily imply the marketing equivalent of building up an FBI file on them whilst simultaneously rifling through their top drawers to find out what size knickers they wear. Wouldn’t you be freaked out if an utter stranger simply walked up to you in the shopping mall and, addressing you by your first name, first asked you if you enjoyed the action movie DVDs you bought there last week and then advises you to check out the great deals on camoflage jackets down the road? Of course you would. And that’s why Facebook need to sort Beacon out, because its the first major error they’ve made in an otherwise faultless business development trajectory.