Facebook's New Features and Your Privacy: What You Need To Know

The Takeaway

Facebook should also do a better job of making it obvious and easy for users to completely opt-out of Instant Personalization. A good way to do this would have been for Facebook to have an alert appear that told you about the new Instant Personalization feature, and then gave you the option to opt out of the new feature right from the alert window.

Instead, Facebook users are notified with a pop-up that sends you to this page. Then, at the bottom of that page, there's another link that takes you to your Facebook Privacy Settings where you can find the Instant Personalization opt-out check box. That's a total of three clicks just to get to the Instant Personalization check box, and Facebook never once explicitly told me that this new box was there, I had to find it on my own.

The other troubling fact is that Instant Personalization Websites can still access your public information through any of your Facebook friend's connections list unless you explicitly block every Website using Facebook's Instant Personalization features. This method of blocking Instant Personalization sites places an unfair burden on the user. Right now, it's easy to block just three sites using Instant Personalization, but what happens when Facebook expands this functionality to hundreds or thousands of partner sites?

Privacy Is About Control

But even though the notion of privacy is changing, I don't think it's unreasonable for you to expect to retain control over the information you share on Facebook. The social network has become better at giving you granular control over how our information is shared within Facebook.com, but now Facebook users may be losing more control as Facebook functionality spreads across the Web and their data gets shared with numerous third-parties.

Control As Much As You Can

With Facebook functionality growing across the Web, today would be a good time to examine your privacy settings and make sure you are comfortable with your level of privacy control. The best place to start is your Facebook account's Privacy Settings page , and then check out this page which lists all the information your friends can share about you through Websites and applications. But remember that no matter what you do certain aspects of your profile are always public including your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, friend list, and your fan pages.

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