The last month has seen a couple of big privacy related issues being raised by the people against two of the biggest companies on the Internet today—Facebook, and Google. Facebook’s beacon program, which aims to bring updates on people from around the web to their profiles (while raking in revenue for Facebook for promoting these services), couldn’t have had a worse start to it’s lifespan. Facebook made the mistake of making the service an opt-out, instead of opt-in. The fact that Facebook receives your actions even if you opt-out out of the feature didn’t sit well with consumers as well as advertisers alike. Digging deeper, people found yet more reasons to be worried about.⌘

Facebook responded to all this (though not as quickly as people had hoped) by making it an opt-in feature, and allowing people to quickly opt-out of all the advertisers. Combined with an apologetic Zuckerberg, things seem to have reached a decent balance.⌘

Google on the other hand, didn’t face so much of a ‘crisis’, as a privacy annoyance. Google Reader started sharing your ‘shared’ items with all the people (who use Google Reader) in your GTalk contact list. There is no opt-in, opt-out, or limiting options. So you’re in, and you stay in. Google offered a rather political reply to all the complains, and that was it. That’s much worse than what Facebook did, but since ‘feeds’ are not something many users are aware of, forget about subscribing to them in a reader, it didn’t cause so much of a stir.⌘

What, me worry?

Even though so much has happened, it’s all nice and calm now. Bloggers are no longer writing flame posts, analysts aren’t predicting their demise from popularity, and I’m writing about it. Anyone who thinks that moves and decisions like these are the reason companies fall, needs to get their pants the right way around. These are big companies, with millions of users. No move ever sits well with all of them. Remember when mini-feed came out? That died down too, and Facebook rose in our social-network rankings. Everyday people complain of bloat, but it’s remained where it was — at the top. Google Reader through all the issues, remains the most used feed reader¹, and this is just a minor setback.⌘

It’s a simple case of causality, and people eventually get used to it. Sure, measures must be taken to fix things so that the adaptation comes in quicker than it would have otherwise, but the result is the same. You’ll never see a feature discontinued, or cancelled. What you will see is what I call a ‘calm-down’ period. There will be a fairly decent amount of time gap between two ‘big’ updates. This might be due to complexity of developing the feature, or (in my cynical mind) a time period to allow the last feature to have settled and balanced with the users. Too many changes too soon is never good. But these people have also understood the one thing that people ought to understand by now: no matter what happens, they’re not losing their user-base once it’s established, and in the case of these two companies the user-base is far from established—they’re hooked!⌘