Deactivating "Instant Personalization"

Facebook launched "Instant Personalization" along with other privacy changes last week. This change shares user information with third party web sites Yelp, Microsoft Docs and Pandora. It also opens the door to other partners and advertisers to glean more information about you.

Two nonprofit groups, in response to Facebook's privacy changes last week, put out messages to voice their opposition: The Electronic Frontier Foundation published a timeline of Facebook's privacy policy modifications over the years, and liberal activist group MoveOn.org launched a Facebook group called "Facebook, respect my privacy!".

"They've launched a new program that shares info about you and your friends with external websites--whether you want them to or not," the MoveOn.org group, which had over 14,000 members on Friday afternoon, explained. "They're calling it 'instant personalization.' We're calling it a major violation of your privacy. Again."

There are ways to stop personalization on the partner sites. You can opt out on the sites web page individually or you can opt out on the Facebook site itself. These options are not made clear on either the Facebook or partner web sites, but here is how you do it.


The Bottom Line:

• When you first visit any of these three partner sites while logged into Facebook, you’ll see a blue bar appear at the top of the site letting you know that your experience is being personalized. You can choose to learn more, remove the personalized experience or click "x" to remove the bar.

• If you don't want your experience personalized on these limited number of sites, you can opt out by clicking here. You can also navigate there by going to 'Account' > 'Privacy settings' > 'Applications and Websites' > 'Instant Personalization Pilot Program'

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Related Articles

• Activist groups launch new Facebook privacy offensive (news.cnet.com)
• Timeline of Facebook privacy policy: from reasonable (2005) to apocalyptic (2010) (boingboing.net)
• Facebook's moves and personalized advertising (glinden.blogspot.com)

Protecting Your Facebook Groups

Facebook has changed its formal Privacy Policy among other things, to say that "pages you are a fan of... and networks" are now public information. By default the pages and networks that you belong to, can now be seen by anyone. This could allow someone to find information about you without being in your friends list. You may not want just anyone to view this information.

You can change this by going to the top of the page and clicking "Settings", and then scroll to "Application Settings". In the following window, click "Edit Settings" next to the "Groups" category. You may then choose whom you would like to allow access to this information. If you do not wish for anyone else to have access to this information, set to "Only Me".

If you want, you can "Customize" your Edit Group Settings to allow only certain friends or networks to view the groups in which you belong. Using this feature allows you to include or exclude individual friends or groups. Clicking "Additional Permissions" allows you to keep your groups and pages from publishing to your wall stream and allows you to set for which group changes you get an email from Facebook.

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• Policy Watch: Facebook Says Updated Platform Rules Going Into Effect December 16th (insidefacebook.com)
• Facebook updates privacy policy (cbc.ca)
• Facebook Changes Privacy Options. (plainanswers4u.blogspot.com)