Places – ubisurv

Having been strongly criticised over its ‘Places’ feature for its lack of understanding of the concept of ‘consent’ in data protection, and why ‘opt-in’ is better for users than ‘opt-out’ when it comes to new ‘services’ (i.e: ways they can share your data with other organisations), Facebook is doing it again.

Between today and tomorrow, the new Facebook feature called “Instant Personalization” goes into effect. The new setting shares your data with non-Facebook sites and it is automatically set to “Enabled”.

To turn it off: Go to Account>Privacy Settings>Apps & Websites>Instant Personalization>edit settings & uncheck “Enable”.

(Or of course, you can just ‘Turn Off All Platform Apps” too!)

The really important thing is that if your Facebook Friends don’t do this, they will be sharing info about you as well. So, copy this and repost to yours…

(Thanks to Lorna Muir for this alert)

Via Boingboing: Facebook has been awarded a ‘broad’ US patent on location-based social networking services. This seems curious when Foursquare, Gowalla, Google Latitude and many others were doing this long before Facebook, but it seems that Facebook applied for this patent back in 2007, so even though they weren’t doing it before others, in the way the patent system works, they can claim they were thinking about doing it before others.

Facebook seems to be moving strongly to consolidate its hold on social networking and it clearly sees its location-based service, Places, and such like as being the guarantee of its future success. In short, it seems intent on creating a ‘brandscape’ which recombines the virtual and the material producing a seamless data-stream on the lives of its users for it to exploit.