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Despite the excitement, Facebook's new super sharing features are creating a lot of problems not only for the social network but also for its partners. A pair of congressman are asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Facebook's continuing to track users even after they log out. Meanwhile, Spotify is scrambling to scale back how much information it's compelling users to share by offering a new "private listening" feature that turns off Facebook's new sharing features. Meanwhile, news organizations are catching flak for violating people's privacy by broadcasting what everybody's reading in the new social news apps. When he announced the latest round of Facebook features, Mark Zuckerberg proudly touted the appeal of "frictionless sharing," but a week later, the grinding sound of user revolt is drowning out that message.
The long and short of Facebook's new approach to sharing is that it's a passive experience. When you listen to a song on Spotify, Facebook pushes an update into the new Ticker dashboard to let your friends know what you're listening to. The same thing happens when you read an article in one of Facebook's new social news apps. "We think this is going to make it so that you can make an order of magnitude more connections than you could before," said Zuckerberg when announcing the changes that take the friction out of sharing. But as Jeff Sonderman writes at the Poynter Institute, "One problem is that the 'friction'--the act of choosing what to share, with whom, and how--is what makes sharing meaningful."