Spotify not out to completely embarrass you via Facebook anymore | Hacker News Reader

Spotify not out to completely embarrass you via Facebook anymore

networkworld.com

35 pointsalphadoggs19 comments

Too late. I deactivated my FaceBook account yesterday following that Huffington Post article about "gestures" and streams and whatnot.

I was never vulnerable as I've been using the Facebook Disconnect extension for Chrome, but enough is enough. I considered what I get out of Facebook vs what kind of information they derive from me, and despite being a very heavy FBer, I pulled the plug.

I missed that article, can you link it? Thanks

Sorry. Not Huffington Post, don't know why I could swear it was.

http://www.snowtechnologiesconsulting.com/facebook-users-bew...

EDIT: Because the author mentions HuffPo.

So, not to belittle anyone's privacy concerns, but isn't there a very simple way to make sure that most of these types of auto-share applications don't publish stuff to your stream - by never authorizing the app in the first place?

Yes, by clicking Cancel when you see this kind of dialog: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/beta/authentication/

Or by changing the default privacy setting where it says "This activity will be visible to:".

I think you can block this behavior two different ways,

1. From Spotify, disable "Get personal recommendations by sending music you play to your Facebook Timeline."

2. From Facebook, find a story Spotify published on your Timeline, click on the "edit this post" control and block Spotify from posting to your Timeline.

Tried #2 several times. I kept getting a cryptic error that wouldn't let me remove them. Ended up disconnecting Spotify from Facebook (using #1).

The proper way for them to have done it, is for you to opt-in to sharing your music, as oppose to sneakily telling your facebook friends what you're listening to.

Why do Facebook and all these companies make the elimination of your privacy with a new feature opt-out, rather than opt-in? If they are really building that new feature to help the user, it should be opt-in and the user should have the option to choose it. But when they are making everything opt-out by default, they are clearly doing to help themselves.

If your feature is actually that helpful, then make it opt-in and promote the benefits to the user. If they "buy" it, they will use it. If they don't buy it, then you're doing something wrong anyway.

Companies, please stop eliminating my privacy by default when I use your service or product.

Using these services to build a login infrastructure is tons easier and comes with tons of things that are great for the company building it.

The percentage of people who are worried about privacy is smaller than you think, and those people are happy to use a smaller, worse login/checkout/whatever system if they get to keep their privacy.

Not everyone is tech savvy. They bank on the people who don't realize the implications of over-sharing or simply just don't know any better.

The youngest you can sign up on Facebook is 14...how many 14 year olds are really going to care or know that maybe they should not let Facebook and every other 3rd party application know every nuance to how they use the internet?

Also by automatically having new privacy features opt-out, i'm sure they realize that if they lose 200k people because of it, it's nothing in the scheme of things. Plus chances are 100k of those people will end up reenabling their accounts at a later date.

This whole round of Open Graph apps that share stuff like what you're reading are all opt-in. You have to authorize the app in order for it to publish anything about you (or even know who you are).

(disclaimer: I work at FB, but not on this stuff.)

Opt in on the app level, but not necessarily on the permissions level.

Maybe this is not generally a problem until you get software like Spotify (entirely third party) that now requires a Facebook account to work.

I don't know how they've pulled this off, whether they've forced non-Facebook accounts to add Facebook, or not. But if the former is the case, that is about as far from 'opt-in' as you can get. And up until an incomprehensible oversight was addressed (now 'cleverly' marketed as an amazing feature with its own name and everything), you couldn't opt out.

But of course that's not the end of it. Because the opt-in then opt-out model still allows Facebook to log even the most basic data from the user in that period of time in-between.

While Facebook's cavalier approach to privacy and ethics may become the examples that prove the importance of privacy and ethics in a transitional era (where the introduction of the internet into everyday life is still a very new concept), the "shoot first, ask questions later" method doesn't really endear them to anyone.

No business could show more contempt for its customers and for consumers by partnering up with a business like Facebook and demanding you sign up with them to subscribe to their service.

From a blog post I wrote:

Zuckerberg refers to this as “frictionless sharing,” a dream of a kind of meta-panopticon with which everyone can see what everyone else is doing in real time. There are parts of this that I actually find kind of compelling. The Ticker is a nod toward “ambient intimacy” the idea that you can approximate the low-level intimacy of occupying the same space as someone, in a digital way.

But, by being public, the Ticker fails at achieving intimacy. Because if being in the same room with someone creates intimacy, being in the same room as everyone creates the opposite. It turns all of your activity into performance. And what many have hinted at is that removing friction from sharing just displaces that friction. If everything I do on the web is under the public gaze, I have to reflect for a moment before I take any action — before I listen to a song, watch a video, play a game, or click on a link. It simply moves the friction from sharing onto the activity, in the worst kind of self-censorial way.

http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/10755504272/intimacy-and-perf...

I cancelled my Spotify subscription a few days ago. I'm just not interested in sharing this stuff to my timeline, and unfortunately I can't seem to view playlists from friends without having timeline integration as well.

It's frustrating that privacy features like this have to be secondary thoughts. Sharing your music should have been an opt in feature, not something done automatically.

I fail to see a legitimate argument for using facebook when you simultaneously worry about your data being private. I may misunderstand the predicament here, is it that you don't want your boss/X knowing Y or you don't want facebook/companyX knowing Y? Hopefully it's not the latter.

Does anyone know what Spotify is doing with users who have an account already but are not on Facebook? I really don't want to close my account but if they make Facebook mandatory, I will have to.

To answer my own question:

"I just want to clarify: some users seem to believe we're forcing existing users to be FB. We only require FB for new users." -- Daniel Ek on Twitter.

http://twitter.com/#!/eldsjal/status/118752455440875520

Reply on news.ycombinator.com