Mark Zuckerberg Apologizes To Users About Beacon

By Amit Chowdhry • Dec 6, 2007

Facebook users have been publicly bashing on Facebook Beacon and advertisers slowly started pulling their business away from the technology. Today Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would give users the ability to completely turn off Beacon, including action-storing within Facebook databases.

“About a month ago, we released a new feature called Beacon to try to help people share information with their friends about things they do on the web. 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,” said Facebook cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a blog post.

Beacon is still built into the social network and Facebook can make money with it while at the same time, a user can easily not have to worry about an advertiser tracking them and announcing their consumer activities.

“Last week we changed Beacon to be an opt-in system, and today we’re releasing a privacy control to turn off Beacon completely,” added Zuckerberg. “If you select that you don’t want to share some Beacon actions or if you turn off Beacon, then Facebook won’t store those actions even when partners send them to Facebook.”