James Turk — 2010/04/22 — personal, privacy

It is no secret that I'm not a big fan of facebook — I log in maybe once a month and have found their position on privacy to be somewhat lacking and as a result have slowly withdrawn from the site. The latest changes to the site are something different however, and seem worth talking about.

Not liking a site usually isn't really a problem as long as you don't use the site. The latest changes to facebook change the validity of this assumption. They affect you even if you are on other "facebook enabled" sites which so far include several popular sites including imdb, pandora, and yelp. Even if you opt-out, your friends can still inadvertently share your information with sites they visit unless you take further action to disallow that as well.

Three important things have changed:

No More 24-hour Rule

Applications that use your information can now store it indefinitely where they used to have to re-download it every 24 hours.

This means that if you change your privacy settings after accidentally sharing information with some awful FarmMafia application it won't matter. Making applications to redownload your information every 24 hours seems silly on the surface, but it forced them to acknowledge your current privacy settings.

"Instant Personalization"

External sites can now grab your facebook information in something they call "Instant Personalization" (ie. advertising).

This is highly invasive and is on by default, you don't have to grant access to a site or opt-in to the program.

In order to turn it off visit Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites and uncheck the "Instant Personalization" box.

Doing so will give you the following message:

"Allowing instant personalization will give you a richer experience as you browse the web. If you opt-out, you will have to manually activate these experiences. Please keep in mind that if you opt out, your friends may still share public Facebook information about you to personalize their experience on these partner sites unless you block the application. Learn more."

My friends can still share my public information? Why would they want to do that? The answer is that they wouldn't even realize they were doing it. What they mean here is that when my friends leave this box unchecked they are giving another site access to my information.

It appears that you can control what your friends can "share" by clicking Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites > What your friends can share about you and unchecking the boxes.

Because of the unclear wording, I've also taken the precaution of disabling public access to all profile information as this may be the only way to fully prevent information from leaking to other sites.

Replacing Your Profile With Pages

The other thing you'll notice is that when you go to your profile it attempts to link your interests/etc. to relevant Facebook Pages. For me it listed everywhere I'd worked, my hometown, and the city I live in now, it also lists anything you have in your likes section, etc. and asks if instead of listing it in my profile I want to link to those pages.

This seems innocuous, but what it doesn't tell you is that by "linking you to a page" it makes you publicly viewable on those pages. I didn't think this was a problem as it prompted me and allowed me to choose which ones I wanted to opt-out of linking to. Given the issues with public information on facebook I decided to uncheck all of the boxes, but this gives me the following message:

"If you don't link to any Pages, the following sections on your profile will be empty: Work and Education Current City Hometown Likes and Interests"

Ok, so I can't have any of that information listed on my profile anymore? This leaves my facebook profile looking quite bare: what remains is my birthday, family, university, current city, and gmail address. Given that I have no idea what thing I'll have to opt-out of next without warning it is hard to justify keeping an account at all just to share this information with people that already know most of it.

I have a few friends that post things on my wall instead of using email, Buzz, or Twitter so I'll keep it around as I don't want to lose contact with them — but here's hoping that in the near future I'll be able to communicate with my friends without providing tons of personal information to every website my friends or I visit.