Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has just announced that the company is making yet another change in its controversial Beacon program, the new marketing scheme that automatically notifies a Facebook member’s “friends” that he/she has made a purchase. In the face of increasing consumer group pressure and a campaign organized by MoveOn.org that generated more than 50,000 complaints from Facebook users, the company has now backed down, agreeing to create an option for turning off the Beacon mechanism altogether. In Zuckerberg’s explanation of the move, which was posted on Facebook today, he characterizes the ill-fated plan as a way for people “to share information across sites with their friends.” But this is a highly disingenuous way to describe what is really a new aggressive and intrusive marketing effort, based on massive data collection and personalized, “nano-targeted” advertising.

This stopgap measure by the company is designed to quell the rising tide of criticism against the most controversial aspects of its new marketing system. But it is by no means an adequate safeguard for ensuring privacy protection on this and other social networking platforms. Consumer groups in the U.S. and Europe are calling on government regulators to investigate these new practices and develop appropriate consumer guidelines. It is my hope that the users who have complained en masse to Facebook will become part of a larger movement calling for fair marketing and information practices on social networks. We are still in the early beginnings of this new broadband era, and there must be rules of the game for how business is conducted in the emerging digital media culture.