Well guess what… sometime last week, Facebook decided to stop indicating sponsored / endorsement links! How nasty! Just compare this to the previous versions published in the News Feed. That’s their insidious Beacon advertising program in full effect.
What makes this more aggravating than regular web advertising is that you won’t exactly know when you’d be endorsing a product, let alone have your purchase made known to the public.
While I’ve confirmed with my colleague that she was notified when Facebook was about to publish a story that she had purchased something online, like most users, she wouldn’t have know what this was about and may have simply clicked OK.
To date, I’ve informed two friends regarding their “involuntary product endorsements”, to which they promptly edited their privacy settings to turn off this reporting feature. If you’re a Facebook user and would like to turn this off as well, just follow these three steps after the jump…
Step 1: Click on “Privacy” on the top-right of Facebook’s page…
Step 2: Under “External Websites”, click on “Edit Settings”…
Step 3: Check the box where it says “Don’t allow any websites to send stories to my profile”. Now hit “Save”.
That’s all right?
Well, that simply prevents Facebook from publishing actions you’ve made from their conspirators affiliates (e.g. purchases). If you read the print on that last page, it notes that external websites (e.g. web services you use) can’t publish your deeds in the news feed, but it doesn’t mean that they’ve stopped collecting information about what you do outside of Facebook.
But there are things we want published…
Another point to note, is that this is a wholesale option. There is no granularity for web services where we wouldn’t mind having our actions published and shared. For instance, I’ve seen Typepad users having their blog posts automatically announced in the public news feed. What Facebook needs to do is to let us choose between what we want published, as in to let us opt-in to the ones we want to share, rather than to force us to opt-out entirely.
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Seriously, I don’t get why Facebook keeps exploiting their users’ trust. If only they let us control what we want published, they could still earn their advertising revenue and maintain good karma with their 64 million active users worldwide. Bah!
