Face­book has been rolling out a lot of updates over the past few months. Their lat­est is by far the one cre­at­ing the biggest stir and most dis­cus­sion. It is described as ‘Fric­tion­less Shar­ing’ and changes how apps you have sub­scribed to inter­act with your Face­book wall.

What is Fric­tion­less Sharing?

When you visit a blog or web­site, if you’ve enabled an app access, FB (Face­book) can auto­mat­i­cally post their con­tent to your wall. No more click­ing the ‘Like’ but­ton. No more copy­ing and past­ing links. Depend­ing on the app and the set­tings avail­able, you will no longer have the of choice to share or not. When you visit their site to read an arti­cle, or lis­ten to a tune (for exam­ple) the arti­cle you are read­ing or tune you are lis­ten­ing to will be shared automatically.

Dif­fer­ent apps have dif­fer­ent set­tings avail­able and I have read that some allow more con­trol than oth­ers. Some allow you to turn auto­matic shar­ing off. Unless an app gives me this option, it will be deleted. Cer­tainly from a mar­ket­ing point of view there is enthu­si­asm for ‘Fric­tion­less Shar­ing’ with no wait­ing for ‘Likes’ and ‘Shares’ so many apps (I sus­pect) will not add the ‘off switch’ initially.

Pri­vacy Concerns

If you do a search on ‘Fric­tion­less Shar­ing’ you will find many folks have pri­vacy con­cerns with this new fea­ture.  Their con­cern is this is a new even higher level of intru­sion of con­stant sur­veil­lance of our every move on the Inter­net. I per­son­ally share this con­cern and do not like the fea­ture even though as a busi­ness we could find ways to take advan­tage of it.

Let’s face it, we are being tracked around the Inter­net already with cook­ies unless we browse using stealth mode. Every­one wants to know our buy­ing habits, tastes, Geo loca­tion so they can serve us tar­geted con­tent. It’s like going to a mall where they know what you bought on your last visit, change the ‘On Sale’ item to attract you based on your buy­ing his­tory, greet you by name and ask you if you plan on hav­ing a Taco at the ‘Food Fair’ again this visit…

Mmmm… Cook­ies are Good!

Cook­ies are not inher­ently bad. They help us do many things more eas­ily on the Inter­net. It’s more about what a par­tic­u­lar cookie is being used for. Dis­cussing cook­ies more fully is beyond the scope of this topic but if you want to under­stand how much we rely on them, try turn­ing them off in your web browser pref­er­ences or select­ing the option to be prompted to accept a cookie instead of accept­ing them auto­mat­i­cally. Have fun try­ing to get many of your favorite sites to open! Dis­abling cook­ies will seri­ously dimin­ish your brows­ing enjoyment.

As I have men­tioned, there is a ton of Buzz about this if you search the term ‘Fric­tion­less Shar­ing Face­book’. This one at PC world was at the top of my search and I found it eas­ier to under­stand than many of the more tech­ni­cal ones:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/240592/facebooks_frictionless_sharing_a_privacy_guide.html

A few thoughts to fin­ish with

Bot­tom line is the best advice one can fol­low is to use due dili­gence prior mak­ing a deci­sion to  install an app or not.  Do you really need this app? What does it add to my life? Does it want to take con­trol of my web­cam and record me lip-syncing badly to Adele — Rolling in the Deep, then post to com­edy site?

More time worn and cliched advice… Read the fine print.

Last but not least. Log out of Face­book when you are brows­ing other sites. Doing so is no guar­an­tee FB is not watch­ing your every move, but at least it may not hit your wall.