Facebook starts making interests into automatic Pages: making more private info public

671 facebook automatically making pages.jpg

Just spotted a interesting change on Facebook which suggests FB is moving towards making everything into pages.. and making private profile information into publically visible fan pages.

On the ShinyShiny profile, a dialogue box popped up prompting me to link my interests, activities, school and employer details to pages. It asked if I wanted to opt out. The pages it was suggesting linking to weren’t pages that already existed – but ones that Facebook just automatically created specifically based on what I’d said in my profile. So for example there is no Fan page for “Kittens and Chatroulette” my expressed interest, but Facebook just created one based on my profile and now instead of just having an interest, I like the fan page of that interest. See screengrab below….

670 facebook page automatically created.jpg

We suspect this change is something to do with The Graph and Facebook trying to organise peole around hubs or nodes of information. It would be interesting to see how many of Facebooks 500 million users like kittens. But they are going to have to be a bit semantically smarter to recognise that my two interests could be split up and reorganised as 1) Kittens and 2) Chatroulette.

It must also be something to do with Facebook’s expressed mission to bring more information out from behind privacy controls into the public domain. Now you wouldn’t have to even look at my individual profile to see that I liked Kittens and Chatroulette, you could just search on the Kittens and Chatroulette fan page and see if my name came up.

It hasn’t happened on my personal account so it could be a change that is rolling out slowly or could just affect a few accounts (perhaps ones with defaults set to public).

Anyone else had this happen to them? Any thoughts on what the consequences might be?

Anna Leach

15 comments

  • Do you think that someone will ever invent something that stops spam 100% and we can just enjoy the online blog and forum community without annoying people making more work for blog and forum owners?

    • I have an interest page that was created. I believe someone who was a previous member of my non-profit organization who constantly shared ongoing info about the organization is the one who opted “in” for the “interest” page and should not have because I already have a page for my organization. It is detrimental that I have the page removed. Do you happen to have an email or way for me to remove the page?

  • I had same. And any idea how to get back? If I remove my city i can only ad one existing on the FB. When I try for example Paris_something it is not saved.

  • I had same. And any idea how to get back? If I remove my city i can only ad one existing on the FB. When I try for example Paris_something it is not saved.

  • A friend of mine somehow ended up with a page that shares his name. Now every time he posts or is tagged, it alerts that page instead of him. His profile is useless now except to say that he has one. Needless to say, facebook lost one this time.

  • Happened to me too. I opted to delete my interests rather than have companies mining me for data. I never joined fan sites or downloaded apps for the thing because of the privacy issue anyway. I’m currently in the market for a new social website.

  • Happened to me today. I’m still trying to figure out how to get back to that page with all the checkboxes that lets me specify which of my entries turn into pages. Certainly not an easy process.

  • Yes it happened to me yesterday- a box popped up giving me the “choice” of either linking my work/education/interests etc to public pages or deleting them entirely. There was no inbetween. I “chose” to delete them, and pretty soon if privacy on FB keeps ebbing away I’ll be CHOOSING to delete my whole account.

  • Well, there is no such problem in orkut. There is an option that allows you to make your profile public or private according to your settings.

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