'He who controls the "default option" writes the rules'

From a NYT column on advertising and marketing by Christopher Caldwell:
In early November, Facebook's 23-year-old C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, rolled out an advertising program called Beacon. It would track users onto the sites of Facebook's commercial partners -- Coca-Cola, the N.B.A., The New York Times and Verizon, among others -- and keep their friends posted about what they were doing and buying there.

Did it ever. A Massachusetts man bought a diamond ring for Christmas for his wife from overstock.com and saw his discounted purchase announced to 720 people in his online network. What if it hadn't been for his wife? What if he had been buying acne cream? Pornography? A toupee? You could go on. Researchers at Computer Associates, an information-technology firm, discovered that Beacon was more invasive than announced. MoveOn.org started a petition movement against Beacon that rallied 75,000 Facebook subscribers. ...

The Beacon fiasco gives a good outline of what future conflicts over the Internet will look like. Whether a system is opt-in or opt-out has an enormous influence on how people use it. He who controls the "default option" -- the way a program runs if you don't modify it -- writes the rules. Online, it can be tempting to dodge the need to get assent for things that used to require it. This temptation is particularly strong in matters of privacy. For instance, the "default option" of the pre-Internet age was that it was wrong to read others' mail. But Google now skims the letters of its Gmail subscribers, in hopes of better targeting them with ads, and the N.S.A. looks for terrorists not only in the traditional manner -- getting warrants for individual wiretaps -- but also by mining large telecommunications databases.

So it is with Facebook's Beacon. We used to live in a world where if someone secretly followed you from store to store, recording your purchases, it would be considered impolite and even weird. Today, such an option can be redefined as "default" behavior.

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