You may have seen recently the furore over ‘Beacon’, a new application introduced by Facebook. Beacon is a tool which tracks, when you’re signed into Facebook, what you do online and posts it to your Facebook profile. The idea behind it being that people trust what their peers are doing more than advertising messages from big business, and are thus more likely to buy say, a book, if they see on Facebook that a friend has bought it.

Within seemingly moments of this coming out, people started to complain about the invasion of privacy it contained. Beacon was designed to be installed automatically on everyone’s Facebook profile, and an opt out was only provided on a case by case basis each time it tried to add something to your newsfeed. However many people complained that the opt out message was easy to miss, and didn’t give you a chance to opt out later if you did.

Initially the campaign against it was two pronged. One person worked out the Firefox plugin for blocking Beacon at all times, whilst someone else started a Facebook group called “Petition: Facebook, stop invading my privacy!”. Pretty soon the group made the news and was adding 1000 new members an hour.

So, by the start of this month, Facebook changed it to give users more control over the stories that were published. However, this wasn’t enough for people given the tension that had already been raised about it, so finally yesterday Facebook changed it to be an ‘opt in’ only application, and the founder of Facebook has issued an apology on his blog for the way the whole thing was handled.

There’s a lot that this shows once again about people power and the internet. First of all, did they really do their consultation properly on the new application before introducing it? Did they do any at all? But more important, did they not realise how badly they could get burned by the very people power they have facilitated so well? If they didn’t they surely must have done now, and I think we’d all be advised to learn from this too. Facilitating people’s campaigning and decision making activity isn’t just about giving them the software, it creates a whole new set of work around managing these processes effectively.