Facebook used to be a site that I visited when I was bored or had downtime. It was a diversion that could be accessed at any given moment, and then put back away when it’s purpose was served. The problem is that now, you can’t put Facebook away. You can close your browser window and continue on to surf other sites, but no matter where you go, you’re back at Facebook again. If I’m reading an article on cnn.com, my friends’ comments are listed to the right of the article. If I’m visiting (seemingly) random blogs, I’m being encouraged to be the first of my friends to “Like” the posting. Enough. I’m unplugging from the Facebook version of The Matrix.

The development community seems to have mixed feelings about the recent facebook changes, and the perceived intentions behind them. Some think that it is an inevitable future, and that we are all going to be issued national ID cards with our Facebook profile ID listed. Others don’t like the changes, but still see a world where Facebook becomes the only dominant player. I see it playing out a bit differently. I think the recent changes and initiatives that are coming out of Facebook are the beginning of the end for the giant. I, for one, am closing my Facebook account today, and I suspect that others will begin to do the same, for the following reasons:

• People like to feel like they have “choice” on the internet. Being herded through your online experience by endless recommendations and “you-may-also-likes” takes the excitement out of discovering anything, and leaves people with the feeling that every aspect of their online experience is orchestrated.
• People are boring. I don’t care what my facebook friend said about some article on [insert site name here]. If I wanted to get their view, I would have asked them or, gone to facebook.
• People always come to hate the king. Ask Microsoft, AOL, and Google. As something grows increasingly in strength and reach, people grow uneasy. For me, personally, seeing Facebook “Like” buttons on every website I visit is becoming maddening.

To those that stay, good luck, enjoy the experience. I hope your farms, fishtanks, and mafia families thrive.  And I hope you enjoy the customized Gillete advertisements.  My buddy Carlos did.  For everybody else, I’ll see you outside of Facebook, where I’ll be working on a browser plugin to block the various Facebook “Like/Comment/Recommend/Blah/Blah/Blah” widgets.

Facebook’s recent modifications to their privacy policies is causing concern for a lot of people, and for good reason. Facebook is encouraging third-party sites and developers to leverage their developer platform to gain deliver a more social experience for their users.  Facebook is referring to this new practice as “Instant Personalization”, and it means that  sites will be able to pull profile information about their visitors, as well as about the visitor’s friends.  That last sentence deserves some attention because it is possibly one of the bigger threats to privacy that I have seen done out-in-the-open on the web.

Essentially what this means is that if your friend visits a site that you have no affiliation with whatsoever, that friend can pass your personal information on to that site.  Meaning that whatever permission that you had previously extended to your friend to use your profile details have now been extended to a site with which you have no affiliation, and with whom you have no knowledge.

This attempted increase in reach is startling.  Not starting because Facebook is doing it (research has shown that adding personal information to advertisements results in significantly higher click-thru) but startling because it’s being allowed in the first place.  Google received FAR more attention for their Buzz Privacy Snafu, and that was a much smaller risk to my privacy than what Facebook is attempting.

I’ve considered leaving Facebook altogether (and I still may) I have deactivated my Facebook account as more and more of these privacy violations have surfaced. Below, I detail some of the steps necessary for setting your privacy preferences to prevent “New Instant Personalization”

Select Applications and Websites

Choose Edit Settings under Instant Personalization

Uncheck the “Allow select partners…” checkbox

Uncheck the Allow select partners... checkbox

Confirm that you are sure you want to disallow instant personalization

Confirm your selection

Go back to the privacy setting screen and edit what your friends can share about you

"Edit Settings" for what your friends can share about you

Uncheck all of the things that you don’t want your friends sharing about you

Uncheck what personal information you don't want your facebook friends to share about you

These issues will continue to surface.  As long as people are not actively protecting their privacy, and as long as sites can get higher click thru by posting and sharing personal information, your privacy is at risk.