Chan's Personal Blog

Just one month after Facebook launched Beacon, a controversial advertising platform, the company has scaled back its plans and humbly apologized for stomping on its users' privacy.

"I'm not proud of the way we've handled this situation and I know we can do better," wrote Mark Zuckerberg, the 24-year-old founder and CEO of Facebook, in a blog post.

It's been an extremely challenging month for the high-flying social networking site. Beacon, which was meant to revolutionize advertising by allowing users to broadcast purchases they made on outside sites to their Facebook friends, turned out to be many users' ultimate nightmare. Facebook apparently never considered that sometimes people want to keep their shopping habits to themselves.

The crux of the problem was that when users bought things on Beacon-affiliated sites (such as Fandango or Overstock.com), their friends were automatically notified of the purchase. This notification happened before the purchaser had a chance to approve it.

Immediately after Beacon's rollout, privacy lobbyists, left-leaning political groups and thousands of individuals spoke out. MoveOn launched a campaign and complained that Facebook was ruining Christmas; regulators questioned whether Beacon ads were legal in the state of New York, and Facebook users banded together to oppose Beacon.

It was once scientific heresy to suggest that smoking contributed to lung cancer. Now, another idea initially dismissed as nutty is gaining acceptance: the graveyard shift might increase your cancer risk. [...]

If the shift work theory proves correct, millions of people worldwide could be affected. Experts estimate that nearly 20 percent of the working population in developed countries work night shifts. It is a surprising twist for an idea that scientists first described as "wacky," said Richard Stevens, a cancer epidemiologist and professor at the University of Connecticut Health Center. In 1987, Stevens published a paper suggesting a link between light at night and breast cancer.

Back then, he was trying to figure out why breast cancer incidence suddenly shot up starting in the 1930s in industrialized societies, where nighttime work was considered a hallmark of progress. Most scientists were bewildered by his proposal. But in recent years, several studies have found that women working at night for many years are indeed more prone to breast cancer, and that animals who have their light-dark schedules switched grow more cancerous tumors and die quicker.