Facebook to Share Your Info for Money & Six Things You Need to Know About Facebook Connections

Facebook is now sharing your personal profile information with third parties. For now, it's just a few web sites, like the music site Pandora, and the consumer review site, Yelp.

Facebook is automatically sharing that information, without your consent. If you don't want to share, you have to opt out.

University of Minnesota law professor and privacy expert Bill McGevern says it's an important line in the sand. And for Facebook, with 600 million users, the stakes are high.

“Facebook is trying over and over to get this shared so Facebook becomes the center of the web,” said McGevern.

Facebook want to make money by selling user information.

Last week, Facebook announced new features designed to unlock more of the data accumulated about its users during its six-year history. The senators said the recent changes by Facebook fundamentally alter the relationship between users and the social networking site. Before the change, users had control over what information they wished to share publicly and what information they wanted to keep private.

Among other things, Facebook is plugging into other websites so people can communicate their interests with friends, colleagues and acquaintances online. Facebook also changed its own website to create more pages where users' biographical information could be exposed to a wider audience.

In a statement, Facebook said, "these new products and features are designed to enhance personalization and promote social activity. All of Facebook’s partner sites interact with a user’s consent."

To opt out of Facebook’s new profile sharing is a multiple step process:

STEP 1: Go to the “Privacy Settings.” Go to “Applications and Web Sites.” Then go to “Instant Personalization Pilot Program,” and hit edit settings.

STEP 2: For all users there’s an automatic check in the box below, which allows Facebook to share your information with other web sites. You are automatically “opted in.” If you do not wish to share this information, uncheck the box.

STEP 3: Even after you’ve done this, it is not clear whether you need to “opt out” at the sites where Facebook is intending to share your information, like Pandora and Yelp, and soon many more sites. So you will want to look at the upper left hand corner of those sites to see whether those sites are recognizing your Facebook account and activity. Here again, you need to opt out.

But a word of caution, as Facebook concedes, your information may still be shared through your friends accounts, unless you block the application from these web sites.

Facebook, apparently responding to Congressional pressure, has already made some changes to this “Instant Personalization Pilot Program,” so you may want to periodically check back in to adjust your settings.

 

Six Things You Need to Know About Facebook Connections

 

Commentary by Kurt Opsahl

 

"Connections." It's an innocent-sounding word. But it's at the heart of some of the worst of Facebook's recent changes.
Facebook first announced Connections a few weeks ago, and EFF quickly wrote at length about the problems they created. Basically, Facebook has transformed substantial personal information — including your hometown, education, work history, interests, and activities — into "Connections." This allows far more people than ever before to see this information, regardless of whether you want them to.
Since then, our email inbox has been flooded with confused questions and reports about these changes. We've learned lots more about everyone's concerns and experiences. Drawing from this, here are six things you need to know about Connections:
 
1.     Facebook will not let you share any of this information without using Connections.You cannot opt-out of Connections. If you refuse to play ball, Facebook will remove all unlinked information from your profile.
 
2.     Facebook will not respect your old privacy settings in this transition. For example, if you had previously sought to share your Interests with "Only Friends," Facebook will now ignore this and share your Connections with "Everyone."
 
3.     Facebook has removed your ability to restrict its use of this information. The new privacy controls only affect your information's "Visibility," not whether it is "publicly available."
Explaining what "publicly available" means, Facebook writes:
"Such information may, for example, be accessed by everyone on the Internet (including people not logged into Facebook), be indexed by third party search engines, and be imported, exported, distributed, and redistributed by us and others without privacy limitations."
 
4.     Facebook will continue to store and use your Connections even after you delete them. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they're not there. Even after you "delete" profile information, Facebook will remember it. We've also received reports that Facebook continues to use deleted profile information to help people find you through Facebook's search engine.
 
5.     Facebook sometimes creates a Connection when you "Like" something. That "Like" button you see all over Facebook, and now all over the web? It too can sometimes add a Connection to your profile, without you even knowing it.
 
6.     Facebook sometimes creates a Connection when you post to your wall. If you use the name of a Connection in a post on your wall, it may show up on the Connection Page, without you even knowing it. (For example, if you use the word "FBI" in a post).
 
You can send Facebook your comments on the new Connections here.

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