Maybe Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has so far declined to talk to Robert Scoble — real, fake, or otherwise — and other bloggers for a simple reason. He knows the vast majority of Facebook users, still mostly high school and college kids, don't know and don't care about Facebook Beacon. That's what the above poll indicates. It's not the only evidence.

Bloggers like to compare the Beacon scandal to the mess Facebook made when it clumsily introduced its news feed last year. But let's be clear. The user revolts Facebook witnessed in September 2006 were on an entirely different scale — as in, they were much, much larger.

The day after Facebook announced the news feed, 587,715 members joined a protest group called "Students against Facebook News Feed." Keep in mind, Facebook only had 9 million members at that point. That means nearly 7 percent of all Facebook members joined the group in one day.

Compare that to the protest group MoveOn.org launched on November 20. Two weeks later, only 70,000 members have joined. That's only 0.1 percent of Facebook's 57 million active users protesting the product.

10:43 AM on Wed Dec 5 2007
By Nicholas Carlson
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6 comments

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DaveMcClure500Hats at 10:59 AM on 12/05/07
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excellent points nick.

yet another grounded-in-data reality check.
sample032 at 11:11 AM on 12/05/07
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I think the reason News Feed got so much criticism was how obviously invasive it was. Beacon is invasive, but much more subtly--out of sight, out of mind.
LongAgoYahoo at 11:13 AM on 12/05/07
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Most FB users don't know about, or care about, Robert Scoble either. The valley digerati is not the real world. When you're talking consumer products the "tech A-list" doesn't have the clout they wish they did.
erikahall at 01:01 PM on 12/05/07
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Beacon invades your privacy in rough proportion to how much stuff you buy online.

Hence the distress skews older and more affluent than most Facebook users ("still mostly high school and college kids"). And, unlike the News Feed issue, Beacon has far-reaching ramifications, touching the whole social/commercial Web.
ron_burgundy at 04:15 PM on 12/05/07
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Ditto Sample32. It's not clear how much data Facebook is getting from Beacon partners. It appears that Facebook is getting information about every partner event, regardless if Facebook users are opted in or out. In fact, regardless of whether or not the surfer is even a Facebook user. That's pretty insidious and it's all happening in relative obscurity.

That a large percentage of users don't know or don't care doesn't change that.
Joel York at 06:22 PM on 12/07/07
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I find it interesting that people would cite statistics about users knowledge of Beacon as an accurate measure of the impact of this event to the Facebook valuation. User awareness is testing revenue, not risk, i.e., how many users know or care = how many users might leave. Second, there seems to be an assumption that the risk is somehow been taken care of since the apology.

While users leaving may be the issue in the final analysis, at this stage it is a PR problem. Teenagers may not know, but their parents might.
And, although disaster may have been narrowly avoided, this is strike one. A second stumble will have this one as a launching pad. And, it remains to be seen if it will impact Facebook's overall approach, because the fundamental business model rely's on bartering privacy. and puts consumer trust at risk.