This year, the Grinch has a new name: Facebook.
The social-networking Web site has ruined the holidays for many users whose private online gift purchases were publicly displayed on the Facebook.com News Feed, inspiring potential lawsuits and a massive wave of online protest.
Facing these objections, Facebook caved to pressure this week to reform its Beacon program, an advertising platform that broadcasts user purchases from partner businesses like Travelocity, Fandango and Overstock.com.
"We're moving into an era in which people's individual activities are being followed and parsed for advertising," Annenberg professor Joseph Turow said.
After complaints of privacy violations and the inability to block public information sharing of consumer histories, Facebook altered Beacon from an opt-out to an opt-in system, and upon further pressure, has allowed users to turn off the advertising feature altogether.
"We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature," Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a statement. "We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it."
But mere apologies were not enough for the 50,000 users who signed an online petition sponsored by the civic action group MoveOn.org.
Action was demanded, and results were relatively quick: The Beacon program had only been operating for one month before Facebook announced the change.
According to Wharton senior Joshua Hsu, this is at least one step in the right direction. "It should be the student giving consent rather than the companies assuming consent," he said.
But even with the dust settling on Beacon, the Facebook fiasco has raised lingering questions about future online privacy issues.
Beacon and similar targeted online advertising platforms are "almost predictable" from sites like Facebook, often "undermining privacy in ways that people don't even know," explained Turow.
But "Facebook is not a business of charity," Turow continued, and profits are still the bottom line.
When under pressure to compete with similar social networking sites like MySpace.com, Facebook has to turn to the "core" of what they can offer to generate revenue: the information about the people who use the site.
College senior Jessica Varzaly, who said she had never heard of the Beacon program before, was surprised that her buying habits could become public news for the sake of advertising.
"I would want to be informed about what was being broadcast about me," she said. "I didn't even know [Beacon] existed."
Like Varzaly, the average web user does not understand the extent to which data mining and tracking across Web sites is being used to tailor advertising to previous online purchases, explained Turow.
"To expect everybody to understand what's going on behind the screen is to expect too much," he added.
What's easier to understand is 50,000 people demanding a change, and since Facebook has finally heeded their call, maybe Christmas can be saved after all.
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