The new Social Activity plugin on AirBnB. Image: Facebook
Facebook has launched its Shared Activity plugin, a tool that will give users control over how much they want to share through Facebook-connected web apps.
If you sign into a website like Pinterest or AirBnB using your Facebook login credentials, developers can now offer a one-click control that lets you pick which activities are shared with Facebook. The plug-in presents the choices in a window directly on that website. You’ll be able to have control over who — friends, specific groups, or no one — sees the information. You can also share only certain kinds of activity from a site.
“For example, when an individual uses a music app, she could modify the privacy settings, through the plugin, for specific song listening activities, without needing to go back to Facebook to control what’s shown. Similarly, if a person, through a travel app, likes a restaurant or reviews a hotel, and decides that these activities should only be viewable to a select group on friends on Facebook, he can control this within the plugin as well,” Facebooker Andrew Chen explains in a blog post.
This is a useful addition for Facebook users who want better control over how much of their activity on the web is shared with their Facebook friends. It comes at a time when user privacy issues are at the fore, and proposals like Do Not Track, which hides you from tracking tools used by social sites and advertising networks, seek to give web users more power to control how and with whom their browsing activities are shared.
Facebook’s new plug-in doesn’t alter the experience as broadly as something like Do Not Track, but it is a big improvement to the site’s existing privacy controls. Currently, users need to navigate Facebook’s maze-like sharing settings to change which activities on which sites are shared, and which aren’t. Left unchecked, this can lead to some embarrassing automatic posts: “Robbie just listened to ‘Teardrops on My Guitar’ on MySpace!”
With this new plug-in, you get a set of specific controls for each web app or website, and they’re available to you right there, within the same browser window.
It’s a minor plug-in release that has a notable impact on the amount of information that will come streaming through the Facebook Activity Log and prevent you from those accidental shares. (And keep your Taylor Swift obsession a secret.)
What is noticeably missing from the Shared Activity plugin description is any detail on whether you can control what behind-the-scenes behavior data is shared with Facebook. With Facebook Exchange, the social giant is able to track your activity across Facebook-connected sites, and then give those sites the ability to serve you a targeted ad.
So, even if you say you don’t want to share your activities with your Facebook friends, that doesn’t give you control over what you share with the social giant itself — it can still see every move you make when you log into a Facebook-connected site. As far as the Shared Activity plugin goes, it’s more of a friend-facing privacy control.
Facebook was also busy Thursday rolling out several mobile app updates. The Android Messenger app got a redesign, the main Android Facebook app now implements many new Messenger features, and the main iOS app also received some minor updates including performance improvements and iOS 6 support. The company detailed its mobile release plans in a blog post, promising that it will push updates to the main Facebook and standalone apps ever four to eight weeks to further stabilize and polish its mobile experiences.
No comments:
Post a Comment