By Jon Hood
ConsumerAffairs.com
April 21, 2010
Less than a year after pulling the plug on its controversial Beacon advertising program, Facebook is again being dogged by privacy concerns as it prepares to unveil its latest gimmick: the expanded "Like" button.
The button is replacing the website's longstanding "Become a Fan" button, which lets consumers voice their preferences via their personal Facebook page. Under that system, users find the Facebook page of something or someone they like -- say, President Obama, or Skittles -- and click the "Become a Fan" button on that page. The user's preferences are then listed on his or her own page, and are generally available for the world to see.
The new "Like" button, according to news reports, would take things to a whole new level, by allowing users to voice their approval of a range of third-party content without even logging into their Facebook account.
Expanded presence
Facebook, which already boasts 400 million users worldwide, is hoping to expand its presence even further, and eat into competition along the way. Some pundits are predicting the button will threaten the very existence of Digg, a website that lets users upload and share content from all over the web. Facebook's new system would essentially cut out the middle man, letting users voice their preference with the click of a button.
Privacy advocates are already voicing concerns that the system is designed to target certain ads at certain users, by gathering information on the types of products and services that they tend to like. Facebook is downplaying any effects that the change might have on users' privacy.
"We've found that 'like' is more global, easy to understand, and users are already comfortable and familiar with it -- making the process of connecting with a page more consistent with how they already interact with things on Facebook," a company spokesperson told The Chicago Tribune .
Still, a confidential e-mail from Facebook to a number of advertisers, obtained by the digital marketing website ClickZ, suggests that the switch is, in fact, all about marketing. The e-mail said that users have been using "Like" twice as much as "Become a Fan," and that the former term "offers a simple, consistent way for people to connect with the things they are interested in.
"We believe this will result in brands gaining more connections to pages since our research has shown that some users would be more comfortable with the term 'Like'," the e-mail reads. "The goal is to get the most user connections so that you can have ongoing conversations in the news feeds of as many users as possible."
Longer paper trail
A report in The New York Times also suggests the button is designed to keep better track of users' preferences -- and target advertising accordingly. The report compared the "Like" button to the existing "Share" button, which allows users to affirmatively post links to third-party websites on their Facebook page.
"While 'Share' buttons allow users to post links that their friends see on their Facebook pages, those links are fleeting," the Times writes. "The 'Like' button will allow Facebook to keep a record of what a user linked to, providing the company with ever more data about people's preferences. Facebook, in turn, plans to share that data with Web publishers, so that a magazine Web site, for instance, may be able to show users all the articles that their friends like."
Whether these concerns are founded remains to be seen -- the button is making its official debut at f8, Facebook's annual developer conference in San Francisco. But privacy advocates already distrust Facebook because of the site's now-defunct Beacon advertising system, which tracked users' activity on other sites, and relayed it back to their news feeds. The system, shut down in November as part of a class action settlement, was designed to encourage their friends to visit those same sites.
While Beacon seemingly bears some resemblance to the system about to be unveiled, the key difference is that there, users had no say in whether or not their online activity was broadcast to the world. Whatever the faults of the new system, it appears to let consumers decide how much -- or how little -- information they want others to have.
