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There’s been a lot of mostly whining surrounding Facebook’s recently-announced Beacon program, which is technically just a conversion-tracking implementation with a twist. Let’s recap.

First, what is Beacon? As greg yardley explains, it’s nothing new technologically speaking and we in the online advertising space have been doing it for some time. For instance, what do you think Doubleclick’s Boomerang product does?

Boomerang is a one-to-one targeting solution for advertisers that allows marketers to identify users who have come to their sites and then re-target those consumers on Doubleclick’s Network, which currently reaches 40 million unique users per month.

Boomerang, and other similar technology, allow publishers to tell Doubleclick to label users following some event in such a way that Doubleclick, and presumably those sites which are its clients, can then later re-target these users with hopefully more relevant advertising. This is all fine if it is done responsibly, i.e., anonymously. It’s actually more than fine if it’s done responsibly, it’s pretty good because it allows for making advertising more relevant, and that’s very very good for both advertisers and consumers.

If you don’t agree with me so far, then this argument can’t go on. It can’t go on because fundamentally, if you think targeting and using third-party cookies to anonymously track behavior so as to increase the relevancy of advertising is evil, then you think that anything involving the use of third-party cookies to make more intelligent decisions when it comes to ad-serving is bad (maybe you think advertising in general is evil and bad?), regardless of whether or not the use is responsible. Sometimes I get the impression that all this recent backlash at Facebook has more to do with people expressing their frustrations with years and years of irrelevant advertising than an actual attack on Beacon’s implementation itself.

But assuming you do agree that cookie-based targeting can be done responsibly and is ultimately a good thing, it’s still worth wondering whether Facebook’s Beacon program is implemented responsibly. And this is what I think the argument should be about – not about who Facebook is setting cookies to, but rather, what they are doing with the data afterwords. And my understanding is that part of what they’re doing is associating some of that data with your FB user profile, going so far as to publish some of your transaction history via your newsfeed to all your contacts and friends without requiring an explicit and clear opt-in, and that, if it is true, is bad and irresponsible because it’s taking what is otherwise presumed to be anonymous data living in the private realm and making it personal data living in the public realm. That would be my beef with Beacon, not that it’s setting cookies on my machine.

Personally, I had hoped and speculated that Facebook’s “SocialAds” announcement, as it was called at the time, would be more interesting than Beacon turned out to be, both for publishers and advertisers, but I digress now…

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