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The ringing outcry against Facebook Beacon, which posted people's online purchases to their friends' News Feeds, led to Facebook altering the program.

Facebook Signals Changes With Beacon

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's aggressive move into referral advertising through the Beacon technology ran into a brick wall of user discontent. After days of complaints that spread throughout the media world, Facebook has changed their Beacon policies.

"Users now have more control over the stories that get published to their Mini-Feed and potentially to their friends’ News Feeds," the company said. Other details of the changes have been published in the Beacon FAQ available to Facebook members:

If you are logged in to Facebook and visit a Beacon Affiliate, an action you take (like writing a review or purchasing an item), may trigger that website to want to publish a story to Facebook. Before that happens, a notification will display in the lower right corner of your screen. If you click "No Thanks"...no stories or information will be published anywhere on Facebook. If you click “Close” or ignore the story, the story will be sent to Facebook, but not yet published.

The previous version of Beacon would go ahead and publish details of a purchase or other conversion activity on a participating website directly to the Facebook user's Mini-Feed, which would then appear on the News Feeds of friends tracking that Mini-Feed.

Some people complained that the notification appearing on a Beacon partner site of the pending publication did not appear. Facebook said people were leaving pages before the notification dialogue could be fully displayed, and they have changed the process to confirm the full notification has been shown to the person.

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