Facebook.com, the Internet home of over 55 million networking teens, students, and adults, met resistance this week in response to a new advertising initiative called Beacon.
Thanks to the large numbers of young consumers who frequent Facebook, the site is a dream come true for advertisers looking to reach youth markets.
"To a company seeking to market its product or service to a young, educated population, Facebook delivers that market very cost-effectively," said Richard Doherty, advertising professor with the Woods College of Advancing Studies, in an e-mail.
The new program, Beacon, tracks purchases that a Facebook user makes on other Web sites, and then details these purchases in the consumer's friends' News Feeds. The notice is often accompanied by an ad for a related product.
According to a recent article in The New York Times, Facebook is not the first to track and utilize information about online traffic. Companies such as AOL and Microsoft routinely track which sites users visit and which searches they have conducted, and then send them ads tailored to this information. Unlike these initiatives, however, the Beacon program is unique in its approach in that it uses this information to advertise not to the consumer, but to the consumer's friends, by sending messages about specific products bought online.
In response to this program, the civic action group MoveOn.org created a petition on Facebook entitled, "Facebook: Stop invading my privacy!" As of Tuesday evening, over 68,000 members had joined in the span of 14 days.
The petition says, "Sites like Facebook must respect my privacy. They should not tell my friends what I buy on other sites - or let companies use my name to endorse their products - without my explicit permission." Many have pointed out the irony present in this argument, given Facebook's reputation as a forum in which one can display personal information, including potentially incriminating photos. Still, many feel that this new program threatens their privacy in a way that their profile picture or relationship status does not.
2008 Woodie Awards
