Facebook's Instant Personalization & Your Privacy
Posted by Eric Torres on Fri, Feb 04, 2011 @ 02:08 PM
Facebook’s “
instant personalization” feature went live yesterday for most members. This feature promises to tear down the walls even further between its social network and the wider Web. When this
feature is turned on, sites like Pandora, Bing, and Docs.com can access your profile to adjust what their websites offer. For example, Pandora will recommend music to you based on bands or music that you’ve Liked on Facebook. The data they access is the same data that you’ve made available to “Everyone” and that can include Likes… as well as items you may not want spread about, like your birthday.
While most of the information that gets accessed from Facebook is harmless, the bigger problem is that many Facebook members have no idea that this feature is live AND turned on by default. This has raised some serious privacy concerns amongst the Facebook’s 500 million+ members who don’t like the idea of Facebook handing out their data to just anyone. At this point, only a few websites can access this feature, but it’s likely that the number will grow.
How To Turn It Off
If you’re of the mindset that you’d rather pick and choose who gets to see your information, you might consider turning this feature off for certain websites or for all of them.
- Log into Facebook. In the top right hand corner, click Account, and then Privacy Settings.
- Under the heading Apps and websites, select Edit your settings.
- Under the heading Instant personalization, select Edit settings. You may see a popup called ‘Understanding instant personalization’. Just hit Close.
- At the very bottom of the page, simply untick the box labeled Enable instant personalization on partner websites. This will instantly turn off partner websites accessing your data.
If, however, the option is greyed out but still ticked, this means that Facebook has not yet activated instant personalization just yet. It takes time. Check back in a few hours, or the next day.
Some users of Facebook may not care at all about the information being passed out, and instead see the new functionality of the partner sites as a huge boon to productivity and, well… personalization. What do you think? Is instant personalization a Like or a Dislike? Let us know!