New FB Plugin Gives Privacy Controls On Other Websites

New Facebook Privacy App

With developers using Facebook’s Open Graph on websites and apps all over the web, users activities are becoming more social because the graph is automatically publishing a lot of activities on other websites and apps (like reading an article on huffpo) into the Facebook News feed or Timeline. Until recently, if you weren’t happy with what got shared on Facebook, you’d have to go to Facebook itself to fix it. Some new privacy functionality can change all of that, according to a new post on Facebook’s developer blog.

After reviewing this nifty little app called the Shared Activity Plugin we were left wondering what it means to allow an app or website to, “take data with you”. The new functionality provides the user ability to adjust the audience controls and what data can be taken from you. The audience controls allow you to set who your updates are shown to or if they are displayed on your timeline. The real benefit for users concerned about who can see some of their activities is, you do have the ability to delete these status updates and wall posts created by actions on applications of other websites and can now prevent them. After all everyone should have a private reading list…

We also concluded through some very scientific research that “almost nobody” would ever dig that deep into their Facebook account settings to find that this even exists. After reviewing the list on our accounts we realized that we were still allowing all kinds of apps to “take data with you”, some these apps we stopped supporting long ago.

Apparently developers can add a plugin to their website that will allow it’s users to adjust their Open Graph privacy settings directly from the site they are on. Lets see if the control aspect proliferates anywhere close to the pace as other open graph integrations (the like button).