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50,000 Facebook members have forced the social networking site to change the way their controversial ad system works.

The site, which has 55 million users, according to Wikipedia, was forced to alter or abandon its Beacon advertising technology.

When a Facebook user shopped online, the system [Beacon] told friends and businesses what they had looked at or bought.

Many users considered the sharing of their personal information to be an intrusion that exposed them to more scrutiny than they were comfortable with.

According to the BBC, Facebook, which was founded by 23-year-old Harvard drop-out Mark Zuckerberg in 2004, and recently signed a lucrative deal with software giants Microsoft, valuing the company at nearly $15bn, responded to their users by letting them have more control over their data.

“Before the changes, Beacon was an “opt out” system and many complained that they missed the chance to avoid using it when it was introduced in early November.

Now Beacon will be an “opt in” system that only tracks data if explicit permission is granted to Facebook to do so.

More than 40 websites, including Fandango.com, Overstock.com and Blockbuster, signed up to use Beacon software on their webpages and report what Facebook users did when they visited,” the BBC reports.