By Jeff Sonderman on Poynter, Sept. 29 , 2011 – Facebook again may have gone too far in its quest to make privacy obsolete, and this time some news organizations could get burned by going along with it.
Facebook spent years making it easier for us to share by building its network and placing “Like” buttons across the Web. Its latest idea goes much further, turning sharing into a thoughtless process in which everything we read, watch or listen to is shared with our friends automatically.
Encouraging sharing is great. Making sharing easier is even better. But this is much more than that. What Facebook has done is change the definition of “sharing.” It’s the difference between telling a friend about something that happened to you today and opening your entire diary.
News organizations and other content companies are eagerly accompanying Facebook down this path.
New Facebook-based apps like Washington Post Social Reader, and similar ones from The Guardian, The Daily and The Wall Street Journal, encourage Facebook users to read their stories and pump all that reading activity out to their friends.
And this isn’t isolated to what you read via Facebook itself. Yahoo News is asking readers to sign up to have their reading activity streamed to their Facebook profile. Services like Spotify and Netflix have their own apps to automatically share all media consumption.
This so-called “frictionless sharing” has big problems.