I'm sick of the Big Dramatic Apologies. Where's Facebook's ethical beacon?

OK, so the Facebook founder gave in -- with a Big Dramatic Apology -- and will let all those "friends" unplug the Beacon. But what we have here is Business by Apology and I'm tired of it. The methodology is this:

1. Do something underhanded, such as violating every known privacy principle in order to monetize a social network.
2. See if you can get away with it. See how bad the outcry is.
3. Then apologize (with much drama) if the outcry is too much.

This seems to be the way Web companies work. Facebook has done it before (a year ago with that news feed thing). Yahoo has done it (think: Chinese dissidents). Apparently you can do any unethical thing you want -- if you come up with a really great "We simply did a bad job" apology. Next these guys will be on Oprah's couch, like the never-ending parade of celebrities whose modus operandi is just-do-it-then-apologize-profusely.

But whatever happened to thinking things through beforehand? Planning. Consulting with privacy experts. Trying it out with focus groups (much as I dislike focus groups, they would've "surfaced" this little problem of massive privacy invasion). Is that too much to ask? Maybe these businesses (and execs) are too immature to know about things like this. At Facebook, even an in-house test with its own employees would have uncovered the obvious problem with spoiled gift surprises.

Or, maybe they really did think it through and decided to give it a whirl anyway -- in good Web-2.0-everything's-beta fashion -- and see if they could get away with it. Knowing they could yank it back if they really, really had to.

Wasn't there anybody inside Facebook who said, um, "Wait a minute, we need to let folks opt out of the Beacon"? Frankly, it doesn't seem like Facebook's chief privacy officer has been a very strong watchdog.

And speaking of beacons: We need Web 2.0 execs to have a better ethical beacon.

Maybe an ethics & technology class is in order?

In the meantime, in the interests of being helpful, here are some books from my bookshelf that would provide a starter education in ethics & IT:

• Computers, Ethics & Social Values, by Deborah G. Johnson and Helen Nissenbaum
• Ethics for the Information Age, by Effy Oz
• Computer Ethics, by Deborah G. Johnson
• Ethics of Information Management, by Richard O. Mason, Florence M. Mason and Mary J. Culnan
• Privacy: What Developers and IT Professionals Should Know, by J. C. Cannon
• Managing Privacy, by H. Jeff Smith

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