Social media It Boy Mark Zuckerberg posted a mea culpa on Facebook about the Beacon program that would track your online purchases and tell your friends.

Some aren't yet mollified, according to this NYT story:

Facebook originally presented Beacon to the advertising community as an opt-in program that its members would choose to use. It planned to sell ads alongside the messages sent to people’s friends about their purchases and activities on other sites. Some advertisers like Coca-Cola have expressed surprise that Beacon then required users to take action if they did not want the messages sent out.

“This is a bit of an example of Facebook being, as we refer to it, ‘out over your skis.’ They got a little bit ahead of themselves,” said Elizabeth Ross, president of the digital advertising agency Tribal DDB West, a part of the Omnicom Group.

Ms. Ross said advertisers did not want Facebook to push its users into a system like Beacon against their will. ...

Privacy groups are working on a complaint to federal regulators about Facebook’s advertising program. In addition to Beacon, the new program includes profile pages created by advertisers and ads sent to users based on what they write about in their profiles.

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said Mr. Zuckerberg should have explained Facebook’s full advertising and data collection program to users.

“The user needs to decide how their information is going to be used, whether it’s going to be used for targeting at all, which advertisers have access to it and whether Facebook has the right to collect and analyze it,” he said. “Facebook is saying it is a safe place for you to share your innermost secrets; what’s not being told to users is that they are selling those secrets.”