"Instant Personalization" Brings More Privacy Issues to Facebook

Author:

Meghan Keane

Source:

Facebook is thinking big with its new releases this week. The social network unveiled several new features at the company's f8 developer conference in California, including an expansion of Facebook Connect that adds social aspects of Facebook to partner sites, without any work for users.
 
This new feature, called “instant personalization,” is a way to access your social graph in more places online. But if users don't particularly want to know their friends' opinions on new sites — or if they have privacy concerns — opting out will become increasingly tricky. 
 
As Patricio wrote earlier about Facebook's new features, it looks like Facebook is trying to "become the web." If people enjoy seeing their friends' activity and opinions around the web, it could certainly make Facebook indispensable in the digital social sphere. 
 
And it all sounds innocuous enough. "Connect with your friends on your favorite websites," Facebook's homepage now reads.
 
Facebook platform engineering lead Mike Vernal tells Gigaom that the goal is to create a "magical" experience fo users. When you log into a Facebook partner site for the first time, it will already be populated with recommendations and notes from your friends.
 
Starting out, there are only three companies that can utilize this feature: Microsoft Docs.com, Pandora and Yelp. And Facebook makes it easy enough to opt-out of seeing personalization when you visit those sites:
 
But as you'll notice...