media guardian story

The billionaire founder of Facebook has apologised to the website's 57 million devotees for its handling of a controversial advertising feature which has sparked furious protests about privacy.
Mark Zuckerberg admitted last night that the social networking site had made "lots of mistakes" in introducing Beacon - a feature which tracks members' activities elsewhere on the internet.
The ad program prompted 69,000 people to sign up to an online petition entitled "Facebook, stop invading my privacy!". Many accused the site of adopting Big Brother tactics to make money.
In a blog entry posted yesterday, Zuckerberg said: "We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more with how we've handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologise for it."
Beacon works by gathering information from other websites about members' online spending habits. Facebook has justified it as an initiative to share people's tastes - for example, by recommending recently purchased DVDs or books to members' friends. But to the anger of users, the feature was initially set up to work automatically unless they opted out of it. Facebook has now changed it to an "opt in" program.
The controversy has been one of the worst in the short life of Facebook, which was established in February 2004 and has rapidly become a global phenomenon. Microsoft recently bought a minority stake in the website, through a deal valuing the venture at $15bn (£7.3bn) which gave Zuckerberg, 23, an estimated paper fortune of $3bn.
Not everybody was impressed with Zuckerberg's apology.
One American member, Andrew Chandler, wrote: "This blog seems to be just another crap piece of PR trying to save face at Facebook."

THIS ARTICLE IS ABOUT PEOPLE WHO ARE ON FACEBOOK AND ARE AGAINST THE IDEA THAT FACEBOOK ARE RELEASING INFORMATION ABOUT PEOPLE THAT HAVE JOINED HOWEVER THEY HAVE NOT GIVEN FACEBOOK PERMISSION TO SEND OUT THEIR DETAILS. I THINK THIS ARTICLE IS IMPORTANT BECAUSE MANY PEOPLE HAVE JOINED FACEBOOK AND PEOPLE ARE ALWAYS TALKING ABOUT ARGHHH GET OVER FACEBOOK IT IS NOT THAT GREAT AS YOU THINK!!!!!