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Facebook Instant Personalization Feature Protested by Privacy Advocates

Shane McGlaun
May 11, 2010
Facebook has found itself in hot water over the last few months with very
public changes to its privacy policy that would result in more of a
user’s personal information being shared with third-party websites.
The backtracking on privacy for users of the site has raised the ire
of more than one consumer watchdog group and some Senators as
well.
Senator Schumer sent
a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg raising concerns
about the new security settings the site is adopting that allows
access to personal information about users by third parties. Schumer
is now being joined by the EFF and MoveOn.org in protesting
the instant personalization feature that Facebook
launched.
MoveOn.org has posted a Facebook Group page titled
“Facebook Respect my Privacy.” The petition page seeks to
get users to sign in protest to the new privacy settings. This sort
of petition in the past has had success in getting Facebook to back
track on proposed changes to privacy settings. The MoveOn petition
before was against the Facebook “Beacon” social advertising
program. Facebook opted to cancel the service before it was
implemented in the face of more than 50,000 signatures to the
petition.
The uproar over the new privacy settings has to do
with the instant personalization tool Facebook has launched. Instant
personalization is a tool that allows third-party websites to pull
public information from Facebook and display it on their website to
personalize the page. This information can include things like
profile pictures and much more.
The EFF is also coming down
against the instant personalization service with senior attorney Kurt
Opsahl stating, “When it [Facebook] started, it was a private
space for communication with a group of your choice. Soon, it
transformed into a platform where much of your information is public
by default. Today, it has become a platform where you have no choice
but to make certain information public, and this public information
may be shared by Facebook with its partner websites and used to
target ads.”
The instant personalization program is still
in beta status.