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From Computerworld.com:

Several Facebook users said today’s announcement that they can now completely turn off the site’s controversial Beacon advertising system is not enough to allay their privacy concerns. The social networking firm has been slammed by a firestorm of criticism over privacy concerns about the Beacon system, which was released last month.

In a blog post today, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it. We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them.”

The people have spoken — and it seems that Facebook is listening. As indicated above, the popular social networking website is owning up to criticism about its ad-tracking system in the face of enormous consumer outcry.

The criticism began in recent weeks when it was revealed that the ad system used by Facebook (known as “Beacon”) tracks all the activities of the site’s visitors, even as they navigate away from Facebook onto other sites. That includes those visitors who aren’t logged in, or who never even signed up with Facebook to begin with.

But, aside from owning up to some mistakes over the feature, the company doesn’t seem to be taking much action to fix the situation, other than providing people with an “opt-out” option that will presumably turn “off” the Beacon software.

As can be expected, this resolution isn’t completely satisfying consumers.

Facebook user Tom Hessman added that Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook will still be receiving data from partner sites whether users opt out or not. “From the sound of it, everything still works as is, except that on the Facebook end you can opt to never have [information about activities on other sites] publish. And if you do, supposedly they purge the data. But with the way Beacon works, the data could still very well exist in Facebook’s standard Web server logs … do they purge those too?”

Meanwhile, user Paulette Altmaier noted on the forum that “It’s much too early to declare victory. It’s not in our interests to have our personally identifiable information aggregated by anyone. An opt-out from publishing is not enough - we want an opt-out from affiliate sites sending anything to Facebook,” she wrote.

Another Facebook user, Simon Smith, said that he welcomed the move for the global opt-out, but also noted that Zuckerberg still “needs to build trust and talk straight.”

Some of the privacy experts who have been criticizing Facebook about the intrusiveness of Beacon, said that the company is still not doing enough to protect its users from data collection.

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said in a statement that “Beacon is just one aspect of a massive data collection and targeting system put into place by Facebook. Mr. Zuckerberg’s goal, as he explained it Nov. 6, 2007 was to transform it into ‘a completely new way of advertising online.’ [He] can’t simply now do a digital ‘mea culpa’ and hope that Facebook’s disapproving members, privacy advocates and government regulators will disappear.”

Nonetheless, Chester did call the move to provide a global opt out option “a step in the right direction.”

What do you think? Is this enough, or does Facebook need to do even more? Do you think they actually will? Sound off in the comments section and let us know what you think.

The original article from Computerworld can be viewed here.