Friday, January 7, 2011

"Instant Personalization"

 

Here is a pretty infomative article about the "instant personalization" setting that showed up last April in Facebook.

How to Opt Out of Facebook's Instant Personalization - NYTimes.com

 

It is a potentially powerful idea – Facebook wants to uncover all these interests and predilections and let us share them with our friends, whether we are at Facebook or somewhere else, in ways that could deepen personal connections and help us discover cool and interesting information.

But there is a price paid in privacy. Facebook deems these “connections” to interests and businesses and content to be public information — along with your name, profile picture, gender and friend list. And it intends to make them very public through new “social plugins” and “instant personalization.

If you like the idea of broadcasting which articles, bands and restaurants you like, you are in luck. But if you would rather keep your personal preferences private, beware. The instructions on how to reverse it are below, after the jump.