Adam Green, Communications Director for MoveOn Civic Action, reached out and set up a call due to my upset yesterday. It was great of him to do so, though thus far we’re having to agree to disagree. He’s right in that they got great press coverage for their protest against the Facebook Beacon, but I think it’s completely irrelevant. As I told Adam when we spoke this morning, Silicon Valley high flyers don’t care what the WSJ and NYT write — because few of their core users get their news from those publications. Facebook’s PR agencies can call Z-Man panicking all they like, he’s extremely unlikely to care.
The naive, ham-handedness of MoveOn’s approach is specifically what set me off. If they want Facebook to notice them, they can get a few hundred thousand people to Block the Beacon. I hope the authors of that FireFox plugin create a Facebook-specific one to make blocking the Facebook Beacon easy for the people that care.
End-user revolts are the way power works out here, not PR and policy documents. There are tens of thousands of Silicon Valley denizens who could have told them so. But they didn’t think to check with experts until they had a small user revolt themselves.
[...] PS: Scott Rafer has two excellent posts on this topic. [...]
[...] For example, Facebook has the weakest protections for user privacy and security of their peer group (Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, MySpace). MoveOn’s petition focuses on consumerism, i.e. people shouldn’t know what they bought for each other for Christmas. They should be talking about what Facebook’s privacy and security policy permits them to do with user data. Remember this? That was only the tip of the iceberg. I’m glad that I’m not the only person who feels this way. More on this (this blogger thinks that MoveOn is tryin to move into EFF’s territory and that they should stay out of it). The fact that Facebook shares data about what our friends are buying and that this is actually a major reason why many people use Facebook - to keep up with their friends, not to hide from them. They shouldn’t just be accosting Facebook for doing something that Facebook WARNED us about (i.e. the social graph). Instead, they should focus on the Facebook privacy and security policies that literally risk the confidentiality of user communications and data. [...]