Facebook’s Instant Personalization compromises your privacy
Without asking your permission, Facebook started to share your personal information with external websites such as Bing, Clicker, Rotten Tomatoes, Docs.com, Pandora, Yelp and Scribd.
This feature is called ‘Instant Personalization’ and was introduced in April 2010. Facebook argues that they want to give you ‘a great social and personalized experience’ when visiting these external websites but they don’t ask for your permission to do this.
Instant Personalization is enabled by default and this is why Facebook is being criticized by many other website and blogs.
When you go to non Facebook websites, you don’t expect them to know who are your friends. The same issue exists when websites decide to adopt the Facebook comments box which shows your image if you are logged in to Facebook.
Charles Schumer, Michael Bennet, Mark Begich and Al Franken are US Senators who decided to write a letter to Mark Zuckerberg to express their concerns about users being automatically opt-in to share their information. Apart from Instant Personalization, they were also worried about Facebook not being able to enforce the 24 hours time limit given to advertisers to view user information.
It is not the first time that Facebook raises privacy concerns and a recommendation it might be smart to visit your privacy settings every now and then to check if anything new manage to sneak away from your awareness. Facebook makes it extremely difficult to change this and as you can see below it takes five steps to disable this feature.
If you want to disable Instant Personalization follow these steps:
1. Go to Account>Privacy Settings
2. On the bottom of the screen, go to Applications and Websites and click on ‘edit your settings’
3. Go to Instant Personalization and click on ‘edit settings’
4. Close the popup window ‘Understanding Instant Personalization’
5. Scroll to the bottom of the page and untick the box next to ‘Enable instant personalization on partner websites’.
You can also see a video describing how to do this here.
Tags: facebook, privacy