Facebook Frictionless Sharing Gets Criticism Amid Privacy Debates [Careful Where You Click; Your Actions Might be Automatically Broadcast to Your Facebook Friends With Seamless Sharing]

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Facebook is about to become more intrusive, as privacy advocates are pointing out. The “frictionless sharing” that the social network is already implementing in some applications will automatically share whatever content you read without your explicit consent.

Facebook’s automatic and seamless sharing is actually ruining the concept of sharing, according to Robert Scoble. He explains that the new feature will automatically share whatever actions a user is doing, which includes content read on third-party websites. These, in turn, appear on friend’s activity tickers — that love-it or hate-it feature that has caused outcry among Facebook users.

A Facebook representative has said that soon at least 60 applications will use Facebook’s frictionless sharing feature, which means that your Facebook profile will automatically share actions like taking photos of food on FoodSpotting or keeping track of exercise sessions with Runkeeper. This also includes music you’re listening to on Spotify. If you’re fond of reading news on Yahoo!, then all items you read will instantly be shared with your Facebook friends. This is the same with the Washington Post. The moment you click the link to an article, it is then shared.

Most users might not find this interesting, until you inadvertently click to read or listen to an item you’d rather not share with your friends, family and co-workers. TechCrunch‘s Josh Constine calls for a reverse form of curation, in which users will now be encourged to “unshare” rather than share items. Users will have to be selective with what they read for fear that their online activity will be tracked and broadcast to social network contacts.

For app developers and content providers, there will be a need to be more responsible with seamless sharing. Most publishers, like NewsCorp, are not giving users the ability to opt-out of instant sharing, so that its The Daily app on mobile devices will automatically share items you read. This is usually done to maximize the viral value of the click and the share.

The short-term solution here, perhaps, is to keep logged out of Facebook, or maybe even keeping your wall and posts restricted for private viewing. But as more and more devices become connected, including smartphones and tablets, this might prove to be difficult. Marshall Kirkpatrick gives some advice on how to deactivate instant sharing on a per-app basis on Read Write Web.

For now, the advice to Facebook users would be to be careful with what you click.

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