Ever experience being surprised about instant applications added to your Facebook profile without your knowledge or receiving questions from your friends asking what you have posted on their walls?
No doubt Facebook is the most popular and most powerful social networking site today but looks like the admins of this site are taking advantage of this fact. Facebook just added a new feature which most users are not aware of including me before I stumbled upon this news from yahoo technology. Facebook applications are automatically added to your profile without your knowledge and as yahoo news puts it, “stopping it isn’t as easy as checking a box in your privacy settings.”
How does it work? When you visit certain sites while logged in to Facebook, an application for those sites will be added to your Facebook profile, no need to sign in to those sites or to allow the intrusion for this to happen. No notification issues, Facebook simply adds them to your profile. Don’t you just feel a violation of privacy settings somewhere?
This new, but definitely, unwelcome, add application feature is due to Facebook’s latest sharing features and tools which integrate sites to your profile by simply visiting them while logged on to FB such as Gawker network of blogs, the Washington Post, TechCrunch, CNET, New York Magazine, and formspring.me.
When this news came out, users immediate worry is privacy issues. Facebook is allowing for its users’ browsing history to be open to public without those users’ knowledge! Can you imagine that? It’s outrageous and totally unacceptable. Some users who already know of the potential privacy issues with Facebook are already thinking of leaving the site.
If you intend to block the sites allowed by Facebook from pulling information from you, read the complete article here. I’ll leave you in the meantime, I need to check my Facebook account settings.
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