Today at Facebook’s f8 (pronounced “fate” developer conference the social networking Goliath unveiled an new system for following their users outside of the Facebook site, and it could end up making the internet a very ugly place. In the wake of their privacy overhaul last December Facebook announced an expansion of the class of information to be considered public by default including a user’s hometown and current city. They also lifted the 24 hour restriction on how long application developers could hold on to user information allowing them to store user information they collect indefinitely. Expanding what they consider public information and allowing partners to hold on to users personal information longer is just the tip of the iceberg.
Connections
In a change announced earlier this week on the Facebook blog activities and interests listed on a user’s profile information will be linked to “community pages” centered around those interests. The EFF covers implications of this new connections system very well on their Deeplinks blog.
Facebook follows you on the internet
Thanks to Social Plugins website operators now have the ability to embed “like” buttons on their own websites. No longer do they need you to be on the actual Facebook site to like the wares that they pedal on Facebook. Prompted by a post on the Facebook blog I went to Levis.com in order to bring back evidence of the feral “like” buttons in the wild.
Exhibit A: Twelve pants each with a “like” button
Exhibit B: Product page for a pair of pants
Clicking any of these like buttons produces the same result as clicking a “like” button on the main Facebook site, which as it turns out does something differently now than it would have a week ago. Clicking a “like” button now does what becoming a fan of something of Facebook used to do. On Facebook Pages instead of displaying fans of the pages topic it displays people who like the page’s topic. It was announced a while ago that this change was happening, but now its in place and judging from how many times Facebook has reverted major changes this is how things are going to stay unless it gets replaced with something newer.
Facebook Applications Leave Facebook
Perhaps the biggest announcement at f8 was Microsoft’s new collaborative office web application Docs.com. This new application uses Facebook as its sign in rather than any of Microsoft’s existing sign in services and represents the most dangerous potential outcome for the Internet at large to arise from Facebook’s expansion, the possibility that Facebook could become the single sign on service for most of the internet’s largest sites.
Yelp and Pandora are also involved in this pilot effort to expand Facebook applications outside of Facebook, but the also appear to be maintaining their existing sign in systems, as is probably necessary to keep their user base intact. The move here though is to allow your signed in Facebook session to follow you across the internet to other sites which would interact with you information in the manner that existing applications for Facebook already do, but without being Facebook applications per se. Depending on how far this spreads beyond the three sites involved in this pilot this could make Facebook the big thing that Google has been afraid of. Considering that Google is beginning to be targeted with calls for anti-trust investigations. Facebook might not be far behind.
As far is I know Anil Dash’s question as to why the default privacy settings aren’t good enough for Mark Zuckerberg remains unanswered.
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