I’m too tired to give this the full rant it deserves, but here goes…

Tonight, I saw the movie Wanted and bought my tickets online. Completely by coincidence, I happened to log in to facebook after getting back since I hadn’t been on in a while. I was surprised to find a notification that I had bought the movie tickets in my public news feed. I don’t at all remember consenting to this, but even if it did happen, it’s not what I want. What if I had seen something really embarrassing like The Love Guru?

In general, I share information quite liberally. You can track a lot of what I do online on my FriendFeed page, my user profiles tend to have a lot of data, and I’m not too obsessive about protecting it. This just felt different, though. This felt like a violation of privacy (even if it wasn’t: I’d imagine I consented to this at some point).

The difference, I think, is that the source data is assumed to be private. Other sites (as far as I know) can’t subscribe to my fandango movie ticket buying feed and do interesting things with the data. When I post a photo to Flickr, I know that action is public, and I’m happy to see notification about it just about anywhere. This is different, and this is not cool.

You can turn this off now (you used to not be able to, I think). Log in to facebook, click “privacy” in the upper right, then select the “Actions on External Websites” and then check the box that says “Don’t allow any websites to send stories to my profile.”.