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Re:Facebook is scaring me by gfodor on Saturday September 24, 2011 @01:32PM (#3033778)
This is bogus, and a slight of hand meant to further erode privacy while giving Facebook an argument to fall back on other than "it's in our interest to post everything you do into our stream."

The bottom line is that what is actually going to happen here in the real world is that people are going to connect their Facebook account to these web sites, not realize or forget (yes, people forget these things) that this web site has been given the keys to the castle to post whatever it wants on their behalf, and a ton of shit is going to get posted to the internet that was beyond the intent of the user originally clicking buttons just to get past an annoying confirmation dialog.

That said, the people fighting against this are fighting a losing battle. Facebook is basically going to control the world unless someone comes in and tries to beat them at their own game and impose their own vision of how and when information like this should be shared.

Re:Facebook is scaring me by dorkitude on Saturday September 24, 2011 @02:10PM (#3033901)
orijing (the engineer at Facebook) is right in that you do have to auth the app.

It's not as though could be browsing one day in search of "abortions Chicago" or "genital warts" and have that auto-published to your FB page. You'd have to give an app explicit permission to share activities on your behalf.

Re:Facebook is scaring me by notahacker on Saturday September 24, 2011 @04:23PM (#3034240)
I think the point is that you could sign up with LocalTimes' funky new daily deals site using Facebook Connect one day, clicking through a generic permissions screen as you do, because you trust LocalTimes aren't going to do anything spammy. If you know what the signup permissions mean (which if you're an average person, you don't) you decide you can live with some of your friends wondering whether you bought the half price pedicure you perused.

A month later, you're Googling for a local STI clinic and have no reason to believe that clicking on the top result (LocalTimes' eclassified section) is going to share your interest in local STI clinics with all your social network. But it is, because LocalTimes' single signon site which you're already logged into makes no distinction about what is and isn't to be shared, but they have made efforts to adopt this revolutionary new form of passive sharing which is going to push up their pageviews.

Re:Facebook is scaring me by ltamake on Saturday September 24, 2011 @02:35PM (#3033964)
But I think the OP's point is that privacy will eventually fade away, so if I'm doing a Google search on "cure for HPV" this will be published publicly to my Facebook profile. I don't really care that "oh, it doesn't publish automatically unless you grant it permission!". I want to be notified when something is posted on my profile.

On another note, I'm seriously considering closing my FB account once and for good and leaving for G+. I have a good crowd of friends willing to do this (and invite their friends), but G+ offers no way to import FB data, which would be a nice feature.

Re:Facebook is scaring me by orijing on Saturday September 24, 2011 @03:00PM (#3034057)
I don't understand. You're afraid that your Google searches will be published to your Facebook stream, so you want to close your FB account and move to G+, because presumably Google is less likely to publish to your G+ profile than to your Facebook profile?
Re:Facebook is scaring me by muyuu on Sunday September 25, 2011 @12:04PM (#3036006)
I'm with you there, which is why I've closed my FB profile long ago, and my G+ profile within the first day (as soon as it forced me to link Picasa).

G+ makes as little sense for a private person as Facebook, if not even less.

Re:Facebook is scaring me by dorkitude on Saturday September 24, 2011 @04:39PM (#3034281)
Wouldn't it be easier just to continue using Facebook, but never grant any permissions to any apps?
Re:Facebook is scaring me by ltamake on Sunday September 25, 2011 @06:26PM (#3036891)
And what if Facebook decides that apps no longer need permission to access profiles? They don't care about using privacy /at all/. They purposely make the privacy controls hard to use.
Re:Facebook is scaring me by funkychickin on Saturday September 24, 2011 @01:53PM (#3033844)
There's always g+ from Google. So far they're staying true to the deliberate opt-in mindset instead of the facebook all-in then opt-out later mindset.
Re:Facebook is scaring me by natrius on Saturday September 24, 2011 @02:17PM (#3033924)
What exactly has Facebook opted everyone into? You have to explicitly allow applications to post things to your wall.
Re:Facebook is scaring me by jarek on Saturday September 24, 2011 @03:46PM (#3034173)
Um, let's see... they started with opting people's profile updates into the newsfeed back in 2006 and went from there.
Re:Facebook is scaring me by watmough on Saturday September 24, 2011 @02:02PM (#3033870)
You forgot the final clause: " later followed by the removal of the choice to opt-out, for your convenience."
Re:Facebook is scaring me by brown9-2 on Saturday September 24, 2011 @03:26PM (#3034124)
Or one day Facebook could overstep and piss off it's common user permanently.