How To Opt Out of Facebook’s New Instant Personalization

Revised April 26th with reader suggestions.

If you’ve signed into Facebook in the last couple of days, you’ve probably seen this message

It seems innocent enough, but as this librarian found out, it’s more complicated (and, in our opinion, invasive) than it seems.

There are two parts to this new feature. One, is that Facebook’s “Like” button is now available across the web. This means that you can be on a website, “like” something, and the link to that page is added to both your Facebook profile and your friends’ newsfeed.

The next part is that Facebook now has “select partners” that can access your personal information when you’re on their sites. Currently, these partners are Microsoft Docs.com, Pandora, and Yelp but more websites are expected to join. As Facebook says,

When you visit a Facebook-enhanced application or website, it may access any information you have made visible to Everyone (Edit Profile Privacy) as well as your publicly available information. This includes your Name, Profile Picture, Gender, Current City, Networks, Friend List, and Pages. The application will request your permission to access any additional information it needs.

Don’t use these partner sites? You should still be concerned because if your friends visit these sites, the partners can still pull in your information.

If this wasn’t invasive enough, Facebook users have to manually opt out of this feature and then block the applications if users don’t want their information shared by their friends.

We recommend opting out. Here’s how:

Sign into your Facebook Account.

Click on Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites

Here, you have to do two things.

First, unclick Allow next to Instant Personalization. You’ll getting a warning message - click Confirm.

Then you have to manually prevent your friends from sharing your information by clicking Learn More under Instant Personalization. Scroll down on this page to How do I opt-out of instant personalization? and click on the heading link. You’ll see this

Click on each application individually and disallow them by clicking Block Application on the left hand side of the page.

You’ll getting another warning message - click Block Docs.

Note: Facebook will most likely be adding more “personalization partners” in the future. You’ll need to check back periodically to manually disallow them from accessing your information.

Revision: Easier Way to to Stop Your Friends From Sharing Information About You
Go to Privacy Settings > What Your Friends Can Share About You > Edit Settings, uncheck all the checked boxes and click save. This way also keeps future Applications from accessing your information. Thanks to James for pointing this out.