Funny how being just a few days blogging is like being a *weeks* late, huh? :)

Anyway, it sounds like a lot has been said about Facebook’s Beacon doing The Seemingly Right Thing by making Beacon 100% opt out, with a surprising amount being said by some of the larger mainstream media organizations.

Its late, but I think its worth mentioning that Mark Zuckerburg’s mea culpa doesn’t directly address the troubling evidence that Beacon transmits data to Facebook, irrespective of whether you’re logged in.  Which leads one to wonder even if you’ve opted out of Beacon, whether Facebook is still harvesting your data, as data is *still* sent to Facebook.

Well, its official. Through a variety of efforts, it looks like Facebook has buckled to the perception that folks don’t like their activities being broadcast across the Facebook network. Mr. O’Neill has the details, but it sounds like that rather than automatically publishing stuff I bought, say that Dancing With The Stars Cardio DVD (did anyone else feel bad for Mel B?) — which I *swear* is for my wife — in the news feeds of my “friends”, it will now appear in my own profile for me authorize *first* before it gets sent out.

Better yet? If a Facebook user “forgets” to do anything about the notification (i.e. authorize or delete it), then the notification will actually go away. Furthermore, it sounds like this authorize / delete option will appear with every commercial transaction between Facebook’s social “partners” and any given Facebook user.

Clearly to privacy fans, this is a time to feel triumphant.

On the other hand, I can only wonder what this is going to do to Facebook’s bottom line. To go from default opted-in, to now, default opted-out, with the choice to opt-in actually *disappearing* if you forget to do anything about the notice? I could see the adoption of the service going from a rankled (and hoodwinked) 70% of Facebook users to a “happy-to-share-my-purchases” 10% or less.

In addition to wondering what this will do to Facebook’s evaluation, I also wonder if all of this will mean a restructuring of the deals Facebook cut with its partners? Of course the actual details of these deals are unknown to many / most / all of us, but if there was some lump sum paid out initially, will any of them ask for a portion of it back?

While the users who are left will clearly be “happier”, and a better representation of users who want to actually share their purchases, and therefore, hopefully a better “quality” of traffic that ultimately converts for these advertisers as the percentage of people clicking on any ads in the past has been utterly abysmal.

I guess the question remains is if these changes, from a marketing point of view, will make using Social Ads any more effective by weaning out folks who are uninterested — and more importantly, if the subsequent volume of traffic that remains is *enough* to justify what Facebook partners are paying Facebook.

Or, perhaps, is that “had” paid Facebook?

Looks like the movement by MoveOn and other privacy groups have really struck a chord with Facebook (Addendum: it looks like a few other organizations, such as Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy are filing motions with the Federal Trade Commission on the basis of privacy violations, which probably has some teeth to it as well) . According to Businessweek they are in fact re-thinking their “once-in-a-hundred-years” advertising revolution as a privacy blunder.

This is good news for everyone, of course, except for Facebook, who has yet to really monetize itself in earnest, and more importantly was really betting the farm on this play. Rather, they were using the hype *from* Facebook Beacon and its social ads to pump up its theoretical evaluation to score a huge infusion of cash from Microsoft, and huge deals with Fortune 500 companies as well.

What will be interesting *now* of course, is if Facebook Beacon does crumble, how *will* it affect the deals it cut? Will any of them expect a (partial) refund? (perhaps a “restructuring” of their initial deal) And if it does affect the perception of this “advertising revolution”, will it in turn affect Facebook’s theoretical evaluation?

I think the answer the latter is “almost certainly”, because while everyone will acknowledge how fast its growing, clearly much of the overage that Microsoft paid for a foot-hold (a 1.6% foot-hold) onto Mount Facebook is *because* of the social ads platform and the hype-therein (which, I think, shows what kind of showman Mark Zuckerburg really is).

What’s also kind of interesting, of course, is looking in retrospect how much of its new evaluation will $240M buy.

(Methinks the answer is “probably much more than 1%”).

Looks like the A-lister brigade is out in force against the opt-in lunacy that is Facebook Beacon. Or, so it would seem, anyway, with Doc Searls, Dave Winer, and Jason Calacanis (and a few others) making some good ol’ impassioned pleas To Do The Right Thing, as this kind of default opt-in status is deceptive, and as Mr. Calacanis eloquently puts it (and I suggest this without a hint of sarcasm) they are Data Hogs as they are “amassing tons of information, selling it under false pretense, and not sharing it with the folks who gave it to them”.

It all makes sense to me, of course.

Will it make sense — as well as the real essence of their cri de coeur — to … say, for instance my *brother*? Or my wife? Or, my non-tech friends? How about *your* non-tech friends?

I mean, will average Facebookers care?

Will they care that Facebook isn’t making available in an easy XML format a copy of all of their data and transactions, available for download at a push of a button? That Facebook is actively scouring the transactions of their life so that it might be monetized now — or later, for that matter?

Let’s phrase it another way.

Do average Facebookers know or care that almost everything they upload *TO* Facebook is then *owned* by Facebook? That everything could be used / potentially abused / sold off in all kinds of ways that makes Facebook Beacon sound like of kindergardenish?

Let’s boil it down even more.

Do you think most Facebook users have even *thought* about reading the Terms of Service?

In an age where we *still* — and will *continue* to until our children our teenagers — read about how an individual’s silly exploits become public knowledge unbeknownst to them, and that news about potentially indiscrete activities could jeopardize your current and future job prospects are still very much News …

The answer to all of the above questions is “Average Facebook users neither know, nor care about the intricacies and *importance* of owning, tending, and guarding, one’s personal data, information, and relationships — unless it directly and overtly impacts their own personal sense of privacy today.”

And Facebook knows it.

In fact, its billion dollar valuation hinges on it.

It hinges on the fact that somewhere deep inside Facebook, I am sure that marketers and venture capitalists are cooking up ways to milk the herd of all its worth without actually alerting the herd to what its doing.

You know, like that privacy thing about the news feed about a year ago.

And that’s all that it really boils down to.

As long as enough people don’t notice or complain about these issues around Facebook nothing will be done. Its in Facebook’s best interests, in fact, that nothing be done.

Getting back to the point at hand, though. Will the cries of the blogging intelligentia be *enough* to galvanize forces within and throughout Facebook? Maybe. Perhaps if there are enough slow news days in the upcoming days and weeks, this could get enough publicity in the mainstream media — via MoveOn.org, for example — for it to catalyze change through public pressure.

But methinks that best way it *could* be done is through a grassroots means *within* Facebook. Someone has to start a group — someone with thousands of friends (like, the limit — 5000) who knows thousands of other connectors — to spread the word.

Because it has to be an attitudinal change, really. And that’s hard to do when its coming from an outside force — it really has to come from within.

You know what I mean.

Getting people curious about what Facebook is really about and what they’re really doing.

Get people interested about what they’re giving up in exchange so that they don’t have to go through the onerous task of actually *emailing* people, but messaging them through Facebook.

Because only if we’re able to do that *first*, will we able to get people to care about Facebook handing over all their data.

Without caring about what Facebook can or can do, and what it does and doesn’t own, nobody will ever want to know or care about these other shenannigans, which make sense to you and I.

But not, say, people like my brother.

And perhaps your brother too.

As a bit of a follow up to a post I did some weeks ago about controlling the kind of information that gets back to Facebook via Facebook Beacon, it turns out that, in a similar vein, it may in fact be difficult to get Facebook to delete all of your information once you decided you don’t want to *be* in Facebook any more.

That is, with Facebook’s Beacon you can choose not to tell your friends (i.e. “opt out”) about your online purchasing activities — your activities may still be captured and stored by Facebook … just not published.

And so it may be with inactivated accounts.

If you decide to pull the plug on Facebook you can choose to deactivate your account, but there’s no guarantee that your information will be deleted.  In fact, it won’t be.

According to a news report out of the UK, the information commissioner in Britain is looking into Facebook because deleting yourself from Facebook is, practically, for many people, very difficult, bordering on the impossible.  You would have to manually remove all of your friends, your associations, your pages and so on.  And as the article states — for many people this could take days, or weeks.  And if this is the case, it might be a violation of the Data Protection Act.

I suppose that a standard of reasonableness will have to be applied to the situation, but I don’t see how getting accounts deleted in their entirety is all that onerous or complicated, for that matter.

Bottom line?  In addition to owning everything you post on Facebook, Facebook has made it impossible to *remove* said information even after you can’t see it (because you’ve “inactivated it”).

tip: all facebook 

So its fairly breaking news, but Marc Zuckerberg has just outlined Facebook’s best attempt at monetization, which involves three separate entities — allowing advertisers to build their own pages, facilitating the engagement between Facebook fans and those advertisers (and the promotion thereof on their own profiles), and perhaps most importantly, something called Social Ads.

Social Ads are ad units that will be customized to a users interests based on the kind of information that that user has given Facebook, with these ad units appearing both in the profiles and as banner ads.

Now, if I was an advertiser, like the 40 some-odd partners that Facebook has, I’d be salivating at the possibility of having unprecedented access to such a large petri-dish of consumers — and the ability to have unprecedented ability to *track* those actions in some kind of cookies/behavioural-based mish-mash of technology (haven’t actually heard what this will be).

But if I was someone who really enjoyed Facebook, someone who enjoyed their sense of privacy, and who might feel threatened, and perhaps angered, at their attempts at cashing in at the expense of the relationships I have — well, I who knows what I might do?

After all, I don’t think any one begrudges Facebook for wanting to monetize its social capital.

What I think people *WILL* take exception to is how these intrusive these ads will feel, how some people will feel like their privacy will be violated for the sake of “highly targeted ad units”, and perhaps, most importantly, how people will *not *be able to opt out.

That’s right. According to Eric Schonfeld’s transcript:

“People will not be able to opt out of these social ads or turn them off, at least for now, unless they stop revealing information about themselves on Facebook. Says Zuckerberg: “It is an ad-supported service. It is a free service.”

Now, its hard to read into what someone else has transcribed, but not only does it sound wrong that you’re not able to opt out of an ad service that is based on your personal data and relationships — but it also sounds, quite frankly, a little arrogant.

What happens now is too nascent to know how things will turn out. But with these changes Facebook will arrive at a crossroads. The question remains, I think is the following: Will people be enjoying Facebook for its benefits to be bothered — or, will lock-in into the Facebook network be too strong — for people to notice, or care, that these kinds of changes will be made?

Too early to tell, I know … but all it would take, I think, is for a few liberally-minded individuals to act like the spark when all of this rolls out in earnest, because something tells me there is a whole lot of tinder that is liable to go up pretty darn quick if given the opportunity.

Bonus: Valleywag has the low-down on how your privacy is an illusion at Facebook

Old-News: You already knew that Facebook pretty much owns everything you put on your profile, right?

Duncan Riley reports that Alibaba has had the typical — or perhaps, more than typical — run up of a hotly expected internet IPO, with its stock price shooting up around 160% of its initial offering.

The big obvious winner is Yahoo, who controls a controlling 40% stake in the parent group of this Chinese enterprise-level e-commerce/trade website, and has made, on paper, over a $1B in the first day alone.

While its a day of financial windfalls for Yahoo in China, its also a day, ironically, that will find its CEO, Jerry Yang, in the Congressional hotseat to answer questions *about* how Yahoo deals with China — specifically, how it gave confidential information to Chinese government officials about a local dissident, leading to that individual to serving 10 or more years in jail.

The financial windfall will score, undoubtedly, the incredible opportunity in China for any net companies; and yet, I think its all the more important that any new media watcher to follow what is said in these Congressional hearings.  BusinessWeek has the details, but the fallout from Yahoo’s shennanigans (if the release of information leading someone to end up in jail can be glibly called a “shennanigan”) may be some interesting US legislation which follows that may make it illegal *in* the US to divulge such private information, which may include phone numbers and social security numbers, to any third party (governments included).

I don’t know how the lobbyists will deal with that kind of impending fight, but should it pass — as BusinessWeek rightly points out — it may make it all but impossible for US based companies to do work in China; even Yahoo, who has a controlling interest in Alibaba (according to the BusinessWeek article), has these issues to contend with as the local CEO has publicly proclaimed that he’ll work with the Chinese government with whatever it needs to do.