Currently, when people sign into their Spotify apps that is linked to their Facebook accounts and automatically broadcast their listening habits to the Facebook news feed, for example, they have to go to Facebook to change the privacy settings if they do not want to spam all their friends with the latest song they are listening to. But, if developers add the “Shared Activity” plug-in, websites can let visitors control the activity they share to Facebook directly from within the site’s Facebook Web app itself.
Image Credit: (Facebook)
“From the plug-in on sites such as Airbnb, people can set the default Facebook audience for activity shared from your app, or manage the settings for stories previously published to Facebook, including selecting an audience or removing it altogether,” Facebook’s Andrew Chen explains in a blog post on the the Facebook Developer’s page.
“This allows people another way to control their sharing on Facebook, in addition to the controls on Facebook in App Settings, inline on timeline, and Activity Log,” Facebook said.
More so, this is a pretty handy addition for Facebook users who want enhanced control over how much of their activity on the web is shared with their Facebook friends.
“The plug-in provides a simple solution for implementing the user controls required when working with Open Graph activities, Like button stories, and comment plugin activity,” explains Facebook’s Chen.
“For instance, when an individual uses a music app, he/she could modify the privacy settings, through the plug-in, for specific song listening activities, without needing to hop back and forth to Facebook to control what is shown,” says Chen. “Similarly, if a person, through a travel app, likes a restaurant or reviews a hotel, and decides that these activities should only be viewable to a select group on friends on Facebook, he can control this within the plugin as well.”
More importantly, this useful release comes at a time when user privacy issues are at the fore, and proposals like Do Not Track, which hides you from tracking tools used by social sites and advertising networks, seek to give web users more power to control how and with whom their browsing activities are shared.
Nevertheless, it is a minor plug-in release that has a notable impact on the amount of information that will come streaming through the Facebook Activity Log and prevent you from those accidental shares.
Documentation for the plugin can be found here.