Facebook is dancing on a slippery slope for the past few weeks. It started off with Beacon – a feature in Facebook which broadcasts users buying habits and trends to his/her friends. MoveOn.org and other public interest sites have successfully brought that controversial feature to the forefront and forced Facebook’s hands in respecting users’ privacy. This was reported earlier on TeqEdge as a win for users over the Facebook corporate machine. But Facebook didn’t get the message. Wired magazine reports that a new feature called SocialAds is allowing companies and applications to use users’ profile pictures for media and publicity campaigns.
Facebook describes Social Ads as they …
leverage the power of Facebook News Feed by serving relevant stories about friends engaging with your business. … The ads can also be shown to users whose friends have recently engaged with your Facebook Page or engaged with your website through Facebook Beacon. … The social stories, such as a friend’s becoming a fan of your Facebook Page or a friend’s taking an action on your website …
According to William McGeveran of the Harvard Law School such acts by Facebook is borderline spam where the advertiser is inserting the user into its ad campaign without explicit permission. Facebook users are only asked in general if they want to share information, not if they want their name and picture to be featured in an ad for some product. If you are concerned of your profile picture ending up on the ad snippets you can restrict Facebook privacy settings.
Highly popular social networking site Facebook has bowed to consumer pressure and removed most of the controversial aspects from its Beacon program. For those of you who do not know Beacon, it is a new information sharing functionality that Facebook recently released. This new program shared users’ online buying habits with other sites which were out of Facebook’s network. Facebook users were not allowed to “opt-out” of the program either. This created a backlash from the large user community and was picked up by MoveOn.org and various other consumer advocacy and privacy protection organizations.
From New York Times … Within the last 10 days, more than 50,000 Facebook members have signed a petition objecting to the new program, which sends messages to users’ friends about what they are buying on Web sites like Travelocity.com, TheKnot.com and Fandango. The members want to be able to opt out of the program completely with one click, but Facebook won’t let them.
Facebook started off as an immensely popular social networking website targeting a very specific and drunk group of individuals aka college students. Since then the website has grown exponentially and now looks to overtake MySpace in popularity. The Alexa graph below should give you some idea how Facebook stacks against MySpace in traffic.
But, as far as I know, Facebook has not paid any of its users. Although, paying users would skyrocket its user base 
Now Lara Saad from I Make Money on Facebook is about to show us all how she earns top dollars from the social networking giant. She started off the site with a brief overview of the money making process. Now she is getting down to business including the all so important little details of her 25 step process in her latest post. It is sure to be extremely popular among the money making blogs and is a recommended good read for everyone using Facebook regularly.
According to William McGeveran of the Harvard Law School such acts by Facebook is borderline spam where the advertiser is inserting the user into its ad campaign without explicit permission. Facebook users are only asked in general if they want to share information, not if they want their name and picture to be featured in an ad for some product. If you are concerned of your profile picture ending up on the ad snippets you can restrict Facebook privacy settings.