Facebook to Face Federal Trade Commission?

EPIC plans to protest both Facebook’s SocialAds–which tells members which of their friends have signed on as “fans” of the advertisers– and Beacon ads, which notifies members’ friends about their off-site purchases.

Okay, I’m not really thrilled with the programs, either. But I think this is going a bit far, really. Check out what EPIC has to say for themselves:

“Part of what Facebook is doing is taking from people the value of their endorsements, which traditionally is something that people can be compensated for, and selling it back to their advertisers,” says EPIC Executive Director Marc Rotenberg.

“Traditionally is something that people can be compensated for,” eh? Amazon.com owes me money for all those reviews I’ve written for them, then. Oh, wait, what? I voluntarily did that just like Facebook users signing up for Social Ads voluntarily? Oh, right.

Just because people can be compensated for their endorsements doesn’t mean that they should be, nor does it mean that we can’t provide endorsements for free. (Besides, I humbly accept the fact that my endorsement won’t bring in the same sum that an endorsement from, say, Michael Jordan would.)

Project Beacon, on the other hand, is way less cool. We already know they’ve had popular opposition from such sites as MoveOn.org:

The activist group MoveOn.org also is campaigning against Facebook’s Beacon program, which publicizes information about people’s purchases to their friends. While users can opt-out of sharing such information –either at the point-of-purchase or on Facebook itself–MoveOn says the program should be opt-in only, to ensure that members have explicitly consented. Last week, MoveOn started a Facebook group “Petition: Facebook, stop invading my privacy!” which had drawn more than 28,000 members by Tuesday.

When I saw it yesterday, Comments