Facebook Wants You To Like Everything, Except Your Privacy
Facebook just made some major announcements that not only change the course of the world’s most trafficked web site, but change the course of the internet itself. Unfortunately, these changes also raise serious privacy concerns. The vast majority of Facebook users will not notice, which is sad. This isn’t the first time Facebook has made major changes to their privacy policy, but these changes bigger implications than any changes made in the past.
Remember those Facebook Connect buttons? They are going to start disappearing. In place of those buttons will be innocent looking “like” buttons. Facebook wants you to “like” (recommend / share) an article, a photo or a product. “Liking” something will automatically post it to your feed. You cannot remove these items on your feed from Facebook, instead you must go back to the web site where you hit the like button and click it again to unlike the item. On top of that, these likes do not have privacy settings. They are viewable by every single Facebook user forever.
The other major change concerns applications. It used to be that applications had access to all of your personal data for only 24 hours. Now they have access to it forever. For all those MafiaWars and Farmville players out there, you better hope you are ok with companies having access to your personal data in exchange for playing their games. On top of that, your friends can share your information to applications. Below is a list of all the things friends can share about you.
Most of these changes are not that bad. What makes them really bad is the average user’s ignorance of their existence. Facebook gives you a small notice at the top of your page the next time you login. It’s pretty misleading.
It used to be that you could fairly safely assume you were surfing the internet anonymously. Now Facebook is turning into your digital fingerprint. You might not be aware of all the places you are leaving your fingerprints, but someone certainly is watching, monitoring and recording. Instant Personalization is only available on Yelp, Microsoft Doc.com and Pandora for the time being, but the feature is definitely going to expand to other places.
If you want to disable Instant Personalization, go to Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites and then uncheck the box at the bottom.
The most important thing you can do is take some serious time to look through all of your privacy settings and the information you’ve written in your profile. You can no longer assume only your friends will be looking at your profile.
You sound like you are not a fan of Facebook. big Brother is always out there.
I don’t have a total problem with Facebook, I just don’t like the direction it is headed.
clever blog post title
Haha, thanks!
CNN carried this story this morning (you beat them by 2 weeks!). Apparently some people are wanting the FCC to look into this. Additionally, I guess there was software glitch that was allowing people to read one another’s “private” message conversations, although it should be fixed now.