Facebook Opens Door to Info

It's hard to escape Facebook these days.  With businesses using Facebook as an informational website surrogate, friends posting daily wall comments, and gaining Facebook-only access to front-row picture scanning, it's almost impossible to adequately function without Facebook in our 21st Century Facebook-driven society.  But if you think this social media microbe has completely conquered our Internet browsers and changed the way we use the term "social" - think again.

At Facebook's recent F8 developers conference in San Francisco, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook will break through the confines of the single browser tab and disperse itself throughout the Internet, hoping to create what the mid-twenties mogul calls an "instantly social and personalized experience."  During his keynote address, Zuckerberg mentioned an array of changes Facebook is planning to implement - and already has.

The major change Facebook is envisioning for the future of the social-web is their Open Graph concept.  This user-exposing model exists with the hopes to stick all of your's and your friends' favorite web activities into one, user-driven web of information. The Open Graph will connect to popular sites like Yelp, CNN, and Pandora, and will inform you about restaurants your friends prefer, news stories your friends have shared, and which songs your friends are rocking out to.

To power this information-revealing Open Graph, websites will begin installing social plugins which instantly access your Facebook profile and display a News Feed-like stream of information relating to the website.  For example, when visiting CNN.com, the already installed plugin connects to your Facebook account and displays information about how fictitious Suzie shared a CNN link.  The plugin also displays a "Like" button for users if they desire to praise the news story with a digital thumbs-up.  

This information will be stored within CNN's website, displayed on the site to future visitors that you liked the article, and will link back to Facebook to notify your friends about your newly found article admiration.  

Along with this plugin, Facebook secured their fate of total Internet domination by announcing the development of a social bar.  The social bar is a full-length strip at the bottom of a site you are visiting which reveals Facebook friend activity streams, a "Like" button, profile pictures of friends who have visited the site before, and a Facebook Chat box so you can constantly stay connected.  

This all sounds cool and everything, but I don't really want to give external websites permission to access my Facebook account.  I just won't log into the plugins and my information will be kept private, right?  Wrong.

Staying true to their wonderful reputation of allowing users to manually opt-in to extrinsic services (sarcasm), Facebook has decided to silently force users to use these plugins by not notifying users and declaring these services as OPT-OUT.  This means most of the 400 million Facebook users (including yourself) are already opted-in to use the Open Graph service and are unknowingly and unwillingly giving "Facebook friendly" websites permission to access their personal information.  

I believe this "what you don't know, won't hurt you" attitude Mark Zuckerberg and friends are exhibiting while developing these falsely claimed better experiences for users could ultimately result in lack of user trust and the downfall of Facebook - That is, if the user becomes aware. Remember, Facebook is a user-driven website.  Without the users, there is nothing.  But because Facebook is volunteering it's 400 million users to opt-in to services like Open Graph, Facebook will undoubtedly become the communul nucleus of the social-web. 

If you don't want to be a part of Facebook's Open Graph, log in to your Facebook's Home Page and in the upper right hand corner click Account -> Privacy Settings -> Applications and Websites -> Instant Personalization (Edit Setting) -> and un-check the check box at the bottom.  

Please share this with your fellow Facebook users. 

Originally published in the Athens Banner-Herald Sunday, May 9th.