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Facebook responds to criticism of new advertising feature

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive of the social networking site Facebook, apologized to the site's users on Wednesday about the way it introduced a controversial new advertising feature last month.

Facebook also introduced a way for members to avoid the feature, known as Beacon, which tracks the actions of its members when they use other sites around the Internet.

Zuckerberg's apology -- in the form of a blog post on Facebook -- followed weeks of criticism from members, privacy groups and advertisers.

"I'm not proud of the way we've handled this situation, and I know we can do better," Zuckerberg wrote.

Facebook has also been meeting with advertising agencies in recent days and discussing their concerns about Beacon, an executive who was invited said.

Facebook originally presented Beacon to the advertising community as an opt-in program that its members would choose to use.

It planned to sell ads -- alongside messages sent to people's friends -- about their purchases and activities on other Web sites.

Some advertisers like Coca-Cola have expressed surprise that Beacon then required users to take action if they did not want the messages sent out.

"This is a bit of an example of Facebook being, as we refer to it, `out over your skis.' They got a little bit ahead of themselves," said Elizabeth Ross, president of the digital advertising agency Tribal DDB West, a part of the Omnicom Group.

Ross said advertisers did not want Facebook to push its users into a system like Beacon against their will.

But that was what happened for a few weeks after Beacon was introduced on Nov. 6. Facebook gave users two notices that it planned to broadcast their actions to their friends -- one when they were on an external Web site making a purchase and the other when they came back to Facebook.

The notices were small at first, and when users ignored them, Facebook assumed the users had granted permission.

After more than 50,000 Facebook users signed a petition about Beacon that was initiated by the political group MoveOn.org Civic Action, Facebook changed its policy last Thursday so that users who ignored the warnings were considered to have said no.

But a Facebook executive then said the company would not offer users a universal opt-out for Beacon.

"We need to make sure we give them the ability to see what things can do for them," Chamath Palihapitiya, vice president for product marketing and operations at Facebook, said in an interview on Thursday last week.

Although Facebook has made the changes that MoveOn.org and others requested, some users aren't happy.

Privacy groups are working on a complaint to federal regulators about Facebook's ad program. In addition to Beacon, the program includes profile pages created by advertisers and ads sent to users based on what they write about in their profiles.
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