Hacker News Reader

Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

I'd consider myself pretty tech-savvy, and I'm still unsure how exactly to do that. The last I heard, I had to individually block each site that I didn't want my data shared with, and the only three I've seen mentioned are Yelp, Pandora, and Microsoft Docs. Is there some place I can monitor for new additions? Or is there a way I can just say, "block all apps by default unless I explicitly enable them?"

View on HN

http://www.facebook.com/#!/settings/?tab=privacy&section...

Click "Edit your settings" down at the bottom left.

Click "Edit your settings" on the "Instant Personalization" setting.

Uncheck the box on the next page.

I've done that, but I was remembering some posts (e.g. http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/how-opt-out-facebook-s-...) that claimed that was insufficient. It seems it depends on how much you want to block; even if you opt out of instant personalization, the API will still let apps slurp some data through your friends (though not data deemed private), unless you've also explicitly blocked that app. The main thing missing seems to be a way to block all apps except a whitelisted set. You can blacklist apps, or you can opt out of apps entirely (there's a setting to turn off app access completely), but you can't block-by-default and then whitelist.

Hey there. I'm Austin Haugen, a product manager on the Facebook platform team. If you opt out of Instant Personalization by following the steps above, you will never receive an instantly personalized experience on these sites and we also block the sites for you, so when your friends arrive your information will not be accessible. This was a change we made in May based on user feedback.

I get:

[✓] Enable instant personalisation on partner websites. Note: instant personalisation is not yet available for you.

The tick is greyed out, so I guess it's not yet active. But I have no way of telling when it will become active, and no way of disabling it preemptively. Another reason to only log onto facebook in incognito/privacy mode.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com