• GigaOm/Forbes.com, Thursday, December 6, 2007 10:32 AM

Facebook has now apologized and changed Beacon for the second time in a week, but for many, it's still not enough. In his apology/update blog posting, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg reveals nothing about this process, although he says users now have the option of turning Beacon off altogether. And while Facebook claims that user activity on Beacon partner sites won't be stored, that doesn't mean the data isn't collected, interpreted and then sold to advertisers. If that's the case, the failure to reveal the practice is dishonest, at best.

But Forbes.com says the move is all about improving the company's relations with the press and advertisers, as the majority Facebook's nearly 60-million users either don't know or don't care about the ad changes. Since the program's unveiling on Nov. 6, the number of visitors to Facebook's privacy settings page rose by just 100,000 users. By comparison, visits to that page spiked by 600,000 following the decision to make user profiles open to public search engines in October.

Read the whole story at GigaOm/Forbes.com »