Facebook draws line under Beacon debacle

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 19 Mar 2010 at 08:42

Facebook will invest $9.5 million to establish a privacy foundation as part of a court settlement that will finally bring the Beacon tracking debacle to a close.

Beacon was launched to much fanfare in late 2007, and monitored your browsing behaviour in order to notify friends of your actions on affiliated websites.

The idea was that when you bought a CD from Amazon, for example, this information would be posted to all your friends, with a link, allowing them to do the same. The scheme brought a storm of controversy and a class-action lawsuit in August 2008 from disgruntled users, forcing an apology from site-founder Mark Zuckerberg

Two years of legal action later and Judge Richard Seeborg has rubber stamped Facebook's offer to donate $9.5 million to a foundation dedicated to raising issues of online privacy and security - an offer he called "fair, reasonable, adequate and proper and in the best interests of the Settlement Class."

The verdict was greeted by dismay by those who brought the suit, as it does not include any form of compensation. However, the judge dismissed their objections claiming that it was "speculative at best" that a jury would offer compensation given the facts of the case.