Facebook has introduced changes to its advertising programme, Beacon, last week, as a result of user pressure.

If you missed it, Beacon automatically alerted your friends to your purchases online from various sites, like Blockbuster and eBay. You did have the option to opt-out, but the default position was that this just happened anyway.

This was an accident waiting to happen. The Ethic of Reciprocity should be at the heart of any advertising initiative, commonly phrased as; “Just as you want others to do for you, do the same for them.”

So, applying the ethic in this case, we ask the question “Would I want everyone in my Facebook network to automatically know about my online purchases?” Answer “Err…no way.” Even if I haven’t got a penchant for buying embarrassing stuff, how about presents I might be buying for those same friends, just as an example.

“Would I want the ability to let everyone in my Facebook network know about my online purchases?” “Errr..yes, that sounds like it could be a cool tool sometimes.” It’s this option that they’ve now introduced, which should have been how it was launched.

But there are a couple of other interesting points to note.

Firstly, this is people power in action. And no one is more vulnerable to this phenomenon than the social networks themselves, so it’s really important that they get sensitive issues right first time. It’s just so easy these days to radicalise and organise any kind of protest movement.

Secondly, 50,000 people signed a petition of protest about Beacon. Sounds a lot, but it’s only less than 0.1% of the total number of users. Admittedly, anyone who signs a petition feels stronger than average about an issue. But even if all these people left as a direct result of this initiative it wouldn’t cause a noticeable drop in users.

Having said that, it was very smart to listen and change, as I bet those 50,000 are disproportionately influential among their peers and they could take an awful lot of them when they left for another network. Such events can cause major impacts and we may well have looked back on it and agreed that it was the beginning of the end for Facebook.

The third point is that Privacy is going to become a major battleground between companies and users in the next few years. Scott McNealy infamously quipped back in 1999 that “Privacy is dead. Get over it.” He may well have been right, it’s just that no one has obviously bothered to tell ordinary people and as businesses we have to be very careful how we treat this issue.

We’ll be doing our predictions as usual at MobHappy towards the end of the year. But one of mine is that 2008 will be the Year of Privacy as a whole bunch of organisations attempt to raise the consciousness of people everywhere that they’re sleepwalking towards a world where government and businesses know everything there is to know about everything we do and buy. There are considerable advantages for users to this in terms of safety, security, efficiency and indeed, not being bothered by advertising that doesn’t interest us. But it would be better if we made a decision that that’s what we want rather than waking up in that Brave New World and find it’s too late to opt out of it.