Following fierce protests from Moveon.org and thousands of its own members, Facebook announced this weekend that it would not move forward with the most egregious invasion of personal privacy in its short history.
But while those who successfully and admirably faced the company down on a poorly planned advertising scheme rejoice, there is no guarantee that Facebook will not sell itself again in the near future. Indeed, it appears that a website college students have come to love and trust is yet another corporation intent on making money and marketing coolness.
The most recent controversy arose out of Facebook's use of Beacon, a system that tracks online purchases from various commercial websites and, in the case of Facebook, routes that information directly to individual profiles.
For example, a UW-Madison student could buy a book, a DVD, movie tickets and so forth, only for that information to suddenly enter the public record, available to anybody with access to their profile. In addtion, the information would appear on hundreds of news feeds simultaneously. Fortunately, Moveon.org led the charge in rightly assailing the practice as intrusive. It was right, and its actions appear to have prevented Facebook from acting as a go-between for bigger, wealthier companies feverishly seeking college-aged consumers.
But small victories do not necessarily reverse an alarming trend. Advertisements from Wal-Mart and Blockbuster, just to name two giant corporations, still pop up regularly on news feeds across the country and, taking into consideration creator Mark Zuckerberg's latest ploy to spread online buying information, it is hard to view Facebook as anything other than a business venture.
Yes, friends and acquaintances can use the site to stay in touch like never before, but that seems almost incidental, a clever vehicle through which advertisers can reach out to young people, throwing a pile of cash at Zuckerberg and others in the short term and hoping for an even larger return down the road.
At its core, Facebook is still a good idea. In fact, the company has made better use of the Internet and college culture than any predecessor, blending the two creatively and successfully. But the idea will persist long after its creator and at some point students both here and elsewhere will have to determine just how willing they are to be the tools of corporate recruitment.
So far, Facebook higher-ups have defended their sell-outs by saying students simply get used to them. Hopefully, that trend will not last much longer.
