Facebook's mea culpa comes at last
Posted
Dec 06 2007, 12:16 AM
by
Kim Peterson
The Facebook debacle-in-the-making may have peaked today, now that founder Mark Zuckerberg has come out of hiding and apologized. To quickly recap: The social networking upstart rolled out an advertising push that was so invasive and abusive that 50,000 members signed a petition to protest the move. The ad program, called Beacon, ushered in a tidal wave of bad publicity for the company. Read my last post for more on Beacon.
Zuckerberg was nowhere to be found as the PR crisis ballooned. Today, his cup of contrition runneth over. He posts:
"We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more with how we've handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it. While I am disappointed with our mistakes, we appreciate all the feedback we have received from our users."
He's saying all the right things, but the apology just sounds unconvincing. Like it's been picked apart and reassembled by an army of PR people and lawyers. Zuckerberg should have given us the real deal.
He also announced that Facebook will now let users turn off Beacon completely. But take note that everyone remains a part of Beacon unless they actively turn it off. In other words, this is an opt-out system, and not the opt-in version that privacy advocates are calling for.
The entire tech blogosphere seems to be discussing this in detail. Here's a sampling:
Fake Steve Jobs: "The smarmy fake apology is not at all reassuring and seems to have been written by PR people who were trying to imitate a 23-year-old kid who's speaking from the heart and trying to sound all sheepish and aw-shucks -- except the flacks can't do it because they're as insincere and stage-managed as as the Facebook guys."
Mathew Ingram: "As nice as it might be to see Mark taking the hit and apologizing, however, you have to wonder: how many more times are they going to get whacked for similar ventures?"
Om Malik: "I think they tried to push the limits, and got some push back, and that’s that. Regardless, had people not contacted them, as Zuckerberg puts it, they would have gotten away with it."
Dave McClure: "Fact of the matter: most of this *** just doesn't matter to most FB users. it might be a PR screwup, but as long as the userbase doesn't have a negative reaction, eventually the advertisers won't give a damn."
BoomTown: "This kind of thing can turn into death by a thousand cuts for a company, if they are not careful and don’t put the right kind of leadership in place with enough judgment to avoid this kind of mess."
