A friend just alerted me to the fact that if you go to the Washington Post website, you'll see a new module in their sidebar that displays your friends' status updates (with profile pics).

I've done some Googling and, from what I can tell, this isn't technically a privacy violation. It seems like that module is simply a window into Facebook, similar to a Picture-in-Picture box on your TV. There's no actual sharing of your information between Facebook and the Washington Post.

So you're only seeing stuff you would be able to see on Facebook itself. Likewise, your friends will only see updates from you if they can also see them on FB. Here's more info from WaPo, although it only talks about the news items being shared and liked—it doesn't mention anywhere about seeing your FB news feed in the module. I don't know if that was added after this article was written or not.

Network News: Facebook integrates with washingtonpost.com

Having said that, this is a perfect example of how Facebook's new "social graph" proliferation is being really badly managed. At best, it's extremely disconcerting to see your friends' private Facebook posts show up on public sites like WaPo. Unfortunately, I have no doubt we're going to start seeing this kind of thing on a lot more sites in the near future.

This WaPo article has an amazing quote that illustrates how tone deaf these companies are (italics mine):

By logging out of Facebook when on washingtonpost.com or when on washingtonpost.com via Facebook Connect, you won't see any of your or your friends' activity on our site. You will still see the module showing which Washington Post stories are being shared on Facebook. For those of you who don't want Network News, we are also working on a clear opt-out feature that will be in place soon.

I'm going to do some more research to see what else I can learn about this new "feature". In the meantime, here's a related article from Social Media Today:

Facebook Open Graph: Washington Post and Future of Social News

Posted in Facebook, My Two Cents, Privacy/Security, Social Media