FaceBook Sponsored Stories - Beacon Redux

Facebook has resurrected a scheme eerily similar to parts of Beacon, the new "Sponsored Stories". In essence, if you write "Hey I am in Starbucks", then Starbucks has the option to pay to spam all your friends with an Ad made of your Post + a Starbucks Ad (see above) in addition to the original post. More than that, it can send even data based on where you go offsite, based on "likes" you have made and/or with sites that have Facebook tie ups. So you may never know what is being recommended to whom - until too late. You also don't get the option to turn it off. This is going to be fun to watch......

Sound familiar? Yes, its a part pf good old Beacon, so roundly criticised just a few short years ago. But this time no one is turning a hair, as Peter Kafka notes:

Recall what Zuckerberg was saying less than four years ago, when he was going to “build a new kind of ad system” based on “social actions” and “information that is shared between friends.” At the time, that sounded wildly ambitious, and maybe a bit creepy....

.....

This is what Zuckerberg was talking about in 2007, right? He just needed time to get there. So did his users.

Remember that when Facebook rolled out Beacon, the site was a big deal, but not the biggest: A mere 50 million users, not 600 million. Many of those people were still trying to get a handle on how the site worked, and what they ought to do with it.

Why is that, you may ask - Kafka believes most users have made a pact with the devil already:

Now, I think, just about everyone who uses Facebook knows, more or less, what they’ve signed on for: A place that wants you to share as much of yourself, with as many people, as you can.

But that's the users. What happened to all those stalwart industry observers and bloggers who rounded on Beacon so fierceely? For that I think you need to look at the bigger point above, ie criticising Facebook when its a (mere) 50 million user startup is one thing, doing it when its a 600 million user behemoth that has a huge PR budget, massive clout in Silicon Valley (the Town where most Tech bloggers ever want to work) and an IPO in 12 months or so is another - you have to be pretty independent to take a Quixotic tilt at the windmill now.

But we are, so we will - the "interesting" ethics that made Beacon a bad idea are still here in "Sponsored Stories", so caveat emptor, as they say. And, as eConsultancy points out, the law hasn't changed:

There's just one problem with all of this -- Sponsored Stories seemingly runs afoul of the same laws that critics argued made Social Ads so problematic:

Common-law privacy torts...forbid someone from appropriating the name or likeness of another, and several states -- including New York and California -- have such laws. New York, for example, forbids the use of a person's "name, portrait, picture or voice" from being used for advertising purposes without the prior written approval from the person.

As George Washington Unversity law professor Daniel Solove noted back in 2007, "It seems as though Facebook might be assuming that if a person talks about a product, then he or she consents to being used in an advertisement for it. But such an assumption might be wrong..." Here, Facebook is doing exactly that; it assumes that a like or checkin, for instance, constitutes consent to feature a user's name and likeness in an ad.

To those who wonder "when will Facebook have jumped the Shark" the answer is clearly not till they have plastered an Ad on every available surface, and told all your friends to boot. Still, we eagerly await the Starbucks Ad at the bottom of the "At Starbucks and by Chr*st their coffee is sh*t" post*

* Sentiment being a hard thing to map by algorithm, especially Irony....