Facebook has released new features under the name of “Instant Personalization” that will share your profile info with select partners outside of the Facebook environment.
Already worried? Scroll down to the steps you can take to protect your info.
How does this work?
Well, first of all, Facebook has already released “social plugins” for web sites that will add Facebook stuff to their pages. The Facebook info is actually loaded into a little frame on each page. The content in the frame shows comments, notes, etc., from your Facebook friends in connection with this web site (assuming your friends have been there).
Keep in mind that you have to be logged into Facebook for the personalization to work. This can happen one of two ways: you log in at the main Facebook site and then browse the rest of the internet, or you log in through one of these social plugins on someone else’s site.
So if you log in, how is your Facebook data used?
Liz Gannes explains it this way at gigaom.com:
Instant personalization means that if you show up to the Internet radio site Pandora for the first time, it will now be able to look directly at your Facebook profile and use public information — name, profile picture, gender and connections, plus anything else you’ve made public — to give you a personalized experience. So if I have already publicly stated through my Facebook interests page that I like a musical artist — say, The Talking Heads — the first song I hear when I go to Pandora will be a Talking Heads song or something that Pandora thinks is similar.
It also will allow your friends to share any information that you currently have given permission to share in your Facebook Privacy settings.
This is all very disturbing.
Why? There are two basic things wrong with their approach:
- Facebook is sharing your information quietly, and the average user will not know enough to either a) opt out, or b) understand the difference between Facebook content and the actual content of the web site they are visiting.
- Taken together, Facebook’s quiet approach and their decision to make all users opt-in to this service by default, they appear both sneaky and too big for their britches.
Let’s break this down.
The idea of a personalized web experience is not bad.
However, Facebook is a social destination, not a browsing mediator/experience.
A personalized browsing experience is what we might expect from a company like Google. They already provide a number of applications to make living on the Internet much easier. Want to read the Microsoft Word attachment in your email, but don’t have that ability on your phone? No problem: Google Docs will copy the document into your own little document area and show it to you as a web page.
But from Facebook? No. For me, at least, Facebook has not yet escaped its roots as a social application.
It’s true that people use Facebook very differently. You could simply use Facebook as the social tool it was originally developed to be, posting updates about yourself and uploading pictures. Other people like the social aspects of being able to post on someone else’s wall and using apps to send virtual cards, smiles, flowers, and other gifts to their friends. Yet another purpose is business and marketing: you can add a page for your business, invite people to become fans, and post announcements about your store. Still others create a profile to use only as a gaming account, connecting to Facebook game apps both large and small.
The point is, Facebook is still a destination. To be fair, I’m not against Facebook’s expansion, but they really need to handle it better. A service like “Instant Personalization” should have been introduced more carefully, with a lot more communication about the feature’s benefits and practical application, allowing users time to grasp the concept.
Most importantly, no matter how this new idea was communicated, Facebook should have respected their users enough to let us opt-in to it. By quietly flipping the switch on all users, Facebook now appears both sneaky. The reactions online have been saying “look what else Facebook is doing to trample all over our privacy” and not “look how innovative Facebook is.”
Facebook also appears way too convinced of their own superiority. Either they feel too big/too important to worry about offending a few users, or they assume that everyone will want to opt-in (so why not do it for them).
Unfortunately, Facebook is offending its users. That’s important because in a world of free and cheap services, the characteristics that set one product or service apart from another are the intangibles, like service and quality.
Facebook certainly isn’t the only social service available out there. If they continue acting this way, I will seriously consider distancing myself from Facebook as anything except a vehicle for reposting my tweets. I may only be one user, and a half geek at that, but there are many more out there who might gladly jump off the Facebook ship for a more user-friendly (in all aspects of the phrase) solution.
These steps will prevent Facebook from sharing your info:
- After logging into Facebook, click on Account and go to Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites. Uncheck the Allow box at the bottom of the page.
- Next, also on your Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites page, click the button to edit “What your friends can share about you.” Uncheck any item you do not want shared by someone else. (It’s quite a list. I unchecked them all.)
- Finally, you need to block three applications. Yes, you apparently need to block them even if you have not used them or explicitly granted them access in the past. You need to block Facebook Docs, Yelp, and Pandora.
- You may want to keep an eye on the Facebook Help Center page about the partner sites in this program. There are only three at the moment, but there is no guarantee Facebook will tell anybody when new ones are added.
Many thanks to PCWorld for sharing these steps.