Facebook Beacon and Hotwire Surprise

Most people don’t care about online privacy as a practical matter. If they’re polled in the abstract they express concern but their behavior doesn’t necessarily reflect that concern. Partly that’s because they don’t know when or how they’re being tracked.

Facebook Beacon has garnered a fair bit of criticism for its monitoring/tracking of user behavior and opt-out (rather than opt-in) character.

But this past weekend, I was somewhat disturbed to find it in action when I made a rental car reservation on Hotwire. I didn’t realize I was still signed in to Facebook and when I concluded the reservation, which was quite a bit cheaper than on other sites BTW, I saw the little Beacon icon show up in the lower right corner of my screen. Gotta shut that down before it disappears I immediately thought.

In many situations, I probably wouldn’t care if people knew I wrote a favorable restaurant review or saw a particular movie. But I don’t want people to know where I stay or that I’m renting particular cars in particular places and so on. It’s this blanket tracking and data capture that creates all the privacy objections and problems — and potential spam in the newsfeeds.

The tool would be much more valuable to everyone if it could be made more selective (perhaps categories of activities that I don’t mind sharing, etc.). However, Facebook makes it a case-by-case opt-out because virtually no one would do it if it were an opt-in; and the value of the Beacon program for advertisers would be severely limited accordingly.