Opt Out Instant Personalization AND Block Mafia Wars

I am continuing to add information to what I consider an important tips guide. Most of my additions are at the bottom under Further on The Instant Personalization Topic.

As you may have noticed, every time Facebook makes a major change to their website, you need to go in and reset your privacy settings.

You need to OPT OUT of the new Facebook Instant Personalization under your Privacy Settings so 3rd parties cannot collect your personal data.
Go to Account–>Privacy Settings–>Applications & Websites

Uncheck allow in the box below. The default appears to be that it is checked.

For some of you, I believe it is newer Facebook users, the page will look like this screen below. Go to the bottom line that says Instant Pesronalization and choose edit setting

That takes you to a second page where you will ensure that allow selective partners to instantly personalize their features with my personal information when I arrive on their websites.

Block Specific Applications

But now that you are looking at your privacy page – also note the Blocked Applications line (the third one down)

Why not block Mafia Wars, Farmville and whatever applications you find annoying from accessing your wall? That way, instead of having to remove from friends people who have fallen victim to these obsessions, you can just block them from posting their latest game blip to your wall.
Facebook Help tells you what to do.

The link they provide here to “Applications’s Profile page” only works if you have already given permission to an application. The link takes you to Application Settings – Recently Used.OR go to “account” and then “application settings”.

This example from my profile is cleaned up – there were other applications there because I had used Facebook Connect to post comments on a few sites.
Aside from Recently Used – there are other choices in the drop down. Take a look.

The link for the application’s profile page is as in the example below for Mafia Wars. Found at http://www.facebook.com/MafiaWars

Further on the Instant Personalization Topic:

The keynotes and other live streams April 21 at #F8 for Facebook 3rd party Developers were very informative. There are replays at http://www.facebook.com/f8

Very Important Article from one of my faves, Robert Scoble called Facebook’s Ambitions where he notes that Facebook wants to own your digital fingerprints.

Thank you to Marsha Collier for this link from Bobbi Newman @Librarianbyday Protect Your Privacy Opt Out of Facebook New Instant Personalization – Yes You Have to Opt Out

Bobbi points out another necessary step from a different page of Facebook help with this quote from Facebook:

To prevent your friends from sharing any of your information with an instant personalization partner, block the application: Microsoft Docs.com, Pandora, Yelp.

This is the same process I taught you above for blocking Mafia Wars but the links are not as easy to find for Microsoft Docs, Yelp and Pandora application related pages.

Go to this link in Facebook Help

Go to this section towards the bottom of the page – this gives you the click throughs for the links:

Now click on each of the applications to block them so that your friends cannot share your personal information with those applications

Block Yelp

Block Microsoft Docs

Block Pandora

www.readwriteweb.com has several good articles on this topic up now AND a really nice implementation of the like button on at the bottom of each of their articles. I was just the 3,242nd liker of an article explaining why you should definitely opt out. This was followed by an article warning of knee jerk reactions and a nice three page one for publishers which I bookmarked to my Delicious because let’s face it, a like on my facebook profile is still ephermeral.

April 26, I attended OCWordPress Meetup where there was a lively discussion on this topic. First of all on the best plug-in to get the Facebook Like button on your blog with FBLike being the choice of the day. Then on the implications of the Facebook Open Graph. Kicking it all off was an excellent presentation by Gahlord Dewald explaining the implications for semantic search. For those of us that chase SEO trends, this is a very important development in the world of search.