I Want Frictionless Privacy

Netflix now allows frictionless sharing of the movies you watch on Facebook.

Back in 2011, following Facebook’s F8 developers conference, a new phrase began to buzz: “frictionless sharing.” Soon, news-sharing apps proliferated with Facebook, which enabled automatic posting of articles you were reading to your news feed. More famously, Spotify originally required users to register via their Facebook account. Spotify claimed that it was all just to make things simpler for the user: “As most of our users are already social and have already connected to Facebook, it seemed logical to integrate Spotify and Facebook logins,” the company said in a statement. But the move was transparently to create viral buzz in Facebook news feeds. Pretty soon, my feed was full of the unneeded “news” that Joe was listening to Kanye, while Kate was listening to Madonna. My listening habits were likewise broadcast, and though I think I’ve disabled them, I’m not entirely sure (last I checked, the Spotify iPhone app’s privacy settings remained a bit opaque to me).