Facebook Burns BK “Whopper Sacrifice”
Social network Facebook has disabled a Burger King app that proved to be good at getting people to give up their friends for fast food.
Facebook shut down some functions of the “Whopper Sacrifice” application, which rewarded Facebook members with a coupon for a free hamburger when they sacrificed 10 people on their roster of Facebook friends.
The application, which users could also reach by going through a Web site, turned out to garner plenty of publicity for Burger King and according to the chain to be wildly popular with users too. “Whopper Sacrifice” was conceived by Burger King agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky and executed by Toronto-based Refresh Partners
But Facebook had problems with the fact that Facebook friends who were sacrificial victims of the app were notified that they had been ejected for one-tenth of a Whopper. That contradicts the social network’s overall privacy policy of not revealing that members have deleted any of their friends.
The notice also served to spread the application virally, since tossed friends were encouraged to download “Whopper Sacrifice” and start qualifying for their own sandwich.
“We encourage creativity from developers and companies using Facebook’s platform, but we must also ensure that applications follow users’ expectations and privacy,” Facebook said in a statement on Wednesday. “After extensive discussions with the developer, we’ve made some changes to the application’s behavior to assure that users’ expectations of privacy are maintained. The application remains active on Facebook.”
But apparently not active enough for Burger King or its agency. By Thursday morning the WhopperSacrifice.com Web site said “Whopper Sacrifice Has Been Sacrificed”, disabled after users had sacrificed 233,906 of their Facebook friends in order to get a coupon for a Whopper.
Facebook maintained that it had not shut down the application entirely, merely forced its builders to turn off the notice function.
During its week-long intact life on the Facebook app platform, “Whopper Sacrifice” was downloaded and used by more than 82,000 members.
