Whopper < Privacy
Perhaps you’ve heard of the recent campaign by Burger King called “Sacrifice your friends for a whopper”? The campaign was a downloadable app for Facebook that would allow you to “remove” friends from your account to accumulate points to receive a whopper. As usual, BK’s strange and juvenile tactics spread like wildfire and soon people were being published on home pages across north America that they had been sacrificed by a friend.
All in good fun? Facebook didn’t think so.
A week following it’s creation, Facebook approached the app creators to ask for a change in how the application published the friend removals as it violated privacy agreements. Naturally, I know I would be a bit miffed if someone decided that whopper > kathryn, so it comes as no surprize that Facebook decided to make this request. However, I want to know how many people needed to complain to make this change come about. With ridiculous petitions and complaints about the interface changes that happened to FB last year, I would think they would have a tin ear by now.
For more on this story, check out the following links:
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/01/14/whopper-sacrifice-shut-down-by-facebook/
http://blog.clickz.com/archives/topics/advertising.html
If you’re not reading the clickz blog, you might want to start. It’s one of my favourites.
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