Facebook's presence is somewhat surprising and suggests that consumers responded favorably to the company's mea culpa over its Beacon ad service, Maier said. Beacon was launched in November 2007 as part of Facebook Ads platform and was designed to track the activities of Facebook users on more than 44 participating Web sites, and to report those activities back to the users' Facebook friends.

The company . The growing control that users have over their privacy settings when using Facebook might also explain the company's presence on the Ponemon list.