What is Facebook Instant Personalization?  It’s an option, which you enable or disable in your Facebook Privacy Settings, which gives Facebook permission to share your public information with selected partners.  Important phrase…PUBLIC INFORMATION.  Keep in mind that public information is the stuff you’ve told Facebook you’re comfortable with everyone seeing.  Here’s how Facebook defines public information:

When you have this feature enabled and then go to one of Facebook’s partner sites, the site will inform you that they are providing you with customized content.  For example, if you have selected The Rolling Stones as a band that you like on your Facebook profile and then go to Pandora, a Facebook partner site, the music site may play music from The Stones because it knows you like them.  There’s a rumor that Facebook is poised to give your information to non-partner websites.  These websites might not inform you that they are using your own public information to provide you with customized content.  In fact, who knows what they might do with your public information.

Whether its partner sites or non-partner sites, Facebook sharing your public information isn’t the main problem.  (That isn’t to say that we’re really psyched about the concept.)  The real problem lies in Facebook users not understanding the Facebook Privacy Settings and how to manage them.  There’s a very simple fix, though.  Just do the following in Facebook:

1. Go to Account.
2. Select Privacy Settings
3. Go to the bottom, left of the page and click on Apps & Websites
4. Go down the page and look for Instant Personalization.  Click the Edit Setting button to the right.  (At this point, you can and should watch a short video prepared by Facebook which aims to help you understand the concept of Instant Personalization.)
5. Go down to the bottom of the page and uncheck the Select Edit Settings and then uncheck “Enable”.

It is important to understand, if your friends don’t do this as well, they may be sharing information about you so, give them the link to this post so they can follow the simple steps as well.

Listen, we’re not saying Facebook does no evil.  We’re just saying, just like in real life, in the online world you can limit your exposure by educating yourself and taking the necessary steps to be safer.