A lot of people are up in arms about beacon. However, Facebook is good at taking this stuff right on the chin. Exact same thing happened with the NewsFeeds too:

step 1, broadcast formerly private data to friends, then wait for the outcry

step 2, apologize profusely, give users control, scale it back a bit, and then continue sharing an unprecedented amount of formerly private data (for competitive advantage I might add)

It’s interesting to examine similarities between Mark Zuckerberg’s latest apology for Beacon and this much earlier apology for the NewsFeed (which turned out to be a brilliant move).

Can they do it again? Maybe… certainly advertisers want that info, but maybe users do too. Newsfeeds turned out to be brilliant in hindsight, though heavily resisted at the time. Pushing the privacy envelope is strategically important, not just for advertising but for building stronger connections and relationships amongst Facebook’s users (i.e. weaving a stronger social graph). Sure, this time Facebook faces challenges on other fronts (discussed in a recent Fortune article), but I’d be hard pressed to bet against them at this early stage. In time, perhaps we’ll see beacon in a different light too. Privacy doesn’t come from how much we share, it’s in how much control we have over it.