Critical.
Authoritative.
Strategic.
Subscribe to CIO Magazine »

Facebook's frictionless sharing: A privacy guide

Here's how to scale back Facebook's new sharing capabilities to control exactly who gets to see your posts

Should you be concerned about your privacy on Facebook's recently announced "frictionless sharing" plan that lets online sites and services automatically share your activity with your Facebook friends?

The basic idea behind Facebook's new sharing system is that clicking a "Like" button is too burdensome. So why not let a news site do the sharing for you, with almost no action on your part?

All you have to do is authorize a new Facebook application such as The Washington Post Social Reader, The Guardian's new Facebook app, or Yahoo news. Then every time you read a news article online, your activity will automatically be shared with your friends.

Think of it as silent sharing (at least, silent to you). Instead of clicking on a "Like" button, you need only click on an article link and your activity shows up in Facebook's new Ticker in the left hand column of your friends' Facebook home pages.

Shades of Beacon

The new functionality is reminiscent of Beacon, Facebook's now defunct over-sharing system that landed the social network in hot water in 2007. Under the Beacon plan, if you bought movie tickets from the Fandango site, say, Facebook would alert your Facebook friends.

The problem with Beacon was that it was an opt-out program, not opt-in. So Facebook users had to explicitly stop Beacon sites from leaking their online activity back to their friends instead of being given the choice about whether they wanted to participate in the first place.

Frictionless Authorizing

Frictionless sharing is different from Beacon, since you must explicitly authorize a site or app to share your information with Facebook. How this sharing mechanism works depends on the app. Authorizing The Washington Post or The Guardian Facebook apps allows you to read those news sites right within Facebook. The downside, however, is that everything you read is shared back to your friends.

Yahoo News works a little differently. The site has a function called "Social" that can be turned on or off. When it is turned on, frictionless sharing is in full effect, and everything you read is shared via the Facebook Ticker. Turn social off, and you're back to private mode, when only clicking on the Like button will send articles back to Facebook.

The Wall Street Journal also has a new Facebook app that allows you to read the Journal's articles within Facebook, but you must click the "Like" button to share content. Interestingly, however, whenever you open up the WSJ Social app, your friends are alerted that you are now reading The Wall Street Journal.

Facebook's new plans are not just for news services. You can use frictionless sharing to automatically share the music you're listening to through services such as Rdio and Spotify, share the movies and TV shows you watch via Hulu and Netflix, and reveal your fitness activity through Nike+.

Privacy Nightmare?

So, now everywhere you go, everything you do is being sent back to your Facebook friends and stored on company servers. Creepy, right? Maybe. But if you don't want your friends to know you love to read news stories about Lindsay Lohan or that you follow the details of every gruesome murder across the country, here's my advice: authorize wisely.

Don't use the new social functionality in Yahoo News or the Washington Post or Guardian apps if you're concerned about your reading habits leaking out. Instead, use the traditional "like" buttons to manually select what you want your friends to see.

If you do use automatic sharing apps, but want at least some control over who can see what you're up to, you can specify who on Facebook can see your activity. In my experience, most of these apps by default limit sharing to your friends, but you can also choose to share everything publicly or create a custom setting to only share with specific people.

Let's say you want to adjust your settings for Washington Post Social Reader. First, go to your App Settings page in Facebook and then click on the app's name. This will show you all the settings for the app, including the information it can access from your profile and the type of profile data it last accessed.

Toward the bottom, you will see a section called "App activity privacy," which will show you who can see your activity. Clicking on the button on the far left lets you choose to let everyone see your reading activity, restrict it to friends of friends, limit the information to your friends, or follow a custom setting defined by you. Once you select your preferred setting, hit the close button and you're done.

But this method is not foolproof, because your friends could turn around and share your activity with others. Let's say you read an article on Yahoo News and it pops up in the ticker of your friend Richard. He can then turn around and share that article with his friends, and so on.

So if you don't want people to see what you're reading or listening to, or how much you're running, the best thing to do is to keep it off Facebook.

Connect with Ian Paul (@ianpaul) and Today@PCWorld on Twitter for the latest tech news and analysis.

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

More about: etwork, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Nike, Wall Street, Yahoo
References show all

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
Users posting comments agree to the CIO comments policy.
Login or register to link comments to your user profile, or you may also post a comment without being logged in.
Related Coverage
Related Whitepapers
Latest Stories
Community Comments
Tags: Facebook, internet, Internet-based applications and services, online privacy, social media, social networks, Yahoo
Latest Blog Posts
Whitepapers
  • Learning To Compete: IT’s Next Transformation
    CIOs must become competitive players in managing relationships between IT and the business. Megatrends like virtualization, consumerisation, cloud computing, and mobility are forcing a new model for operating IT. This interactive white paper from CIO Magazine and EMC explores this transformation as a leadership opportunity, as an opportunity to create new models for IT, and as a catalyst to fundamentally change the dynamic between IT and the business. Embedded videos feature CIOs from T-Mobile USA and Wharton School of Business and a quick survey provides benchmarking between CIO peers.
    Learn more »
  • 10 Essential Steps to Web Security
    This short guide outlines 10 simple steps to best practice in web security. Follow them all to step up your organisation’s information security and stay ahead of your competitors. But remember that the target never stands still. Focus on the principles behind the steps – policy, vigilance, simplification, automation and transparency – to keep your information security bang up to date.
    Learn more »
  • HP Imaging and Printing Services
    According to Gartner, a major focus for organisations today and in the foreseeable future is shifting from cost reduction to growth, expansion, innovation, and operational excellence. If your organization is serious about driving growth and innovation and improving customer experiences, you’ll find that a well-managed imaging and printing environment is key to these goals. A growing number of organizations are turning to services as a means of integrating imaging and printing into their overall IT infrastructure strategies. It may be one of the fastest ways to continue to drive down costs, fund innovation, and prepare your organisation to capitalise on future opportunities. Read more.
    Learn more »
All whitepapers
rhs_login_lockGet exclusive access to Invitation only events CIO, reports & analysis.
Recent comments