Facebook apologises over Beacon privacy.
 The CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has publicly apologised for the site's controversial web tracking feature, Beacon, in his Facebook Blog.
The controversial Beacon is a Facebook web monitoring feature that notifies a users' friends through newsfeeds when they visit affiliated websites. The feature drew a wave of criticism upon launch, protests against what people claimed was an invasion of privacy began to surface. As a result Facebook introduced a new option allowing users to turn it off completely.
In a post on the company blog, Mark Zuckerberg apologised for the way Facebook had handled the feature. "We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more with how we've handled them," Zuckerberg states. "We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologise for it."
The apology come a week after the company modified Beacon to make it less intrusive.
"We missed the right balance," Zuckerberg admits in the blog. "At first we tried to make it very lightweight so people wouldn't have to touch it for it to work. The problem with our initial approach of making it an opt-out system instead of opt-in was that if someone forgot to decline to share something, Beacon still went ahead and shared it with their friends."
"It took us too long after people started contacting us to change the product so that users had to explicitly approve what they wanted to share," he wrote. "Instead of acting quickly, we took too long to decide on the right solution. I'm not proud of the way we've handled this situation and I know we can do better."
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