[Air-L] the failure of facebook's beacon

[Sam Ladner]

Hello all,
I thought I'd pass along my recent blog post on what we can learn from
Facebook's advertising flop, Beacon. I've shared it with other design
practitioners and it's sparked a bit of a discussion. I invite a discussion
with AoIR's as well.

I argue that the problem with Beacon isn't the privacy aspect, but the
collision of "fronts," to us Goffman's terms. After all, users routinely
disclose much of this information to certain people at certain times. But
disclosing all of this information at the same time to different types of
people is the problem:

http://designresearch.wordpress.com/2007/11/30/what-designers-can-learn-from-facebooks-beacon-the-collision-of-fronts/