Posted on 12/31/2012 2:33:20 PM PST by Morgana
FULL TITLE: Netflix customers' ENTIRE movie rental history to be shared with Facebook... including all your guilty pleasures
Netflix users will soon be able to share every film they have watched with their Facebook friends - allowing the social networking giant even more lucrative information on its users' leisure time.
Up until now the Video Privacy Protection Act prohibited Netflix and other streaming services such as Hulu from sharing their customers' history or allowing them to post it themselves.
However, Congress has now passed a bill to the 1988 act that allows users to opt in or out of forthcoming Facebook 'social sharing' features, which let advertisers reach customers who watch movies on the streaming sites but do not 'like' it on those sites.
The Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) previously prevented these actions by stating in law that a person's movie rental history cannot be disclosed without written consent - the law was enacted after supreme court hopeful Robert Bork's rental history was leaked to Washington D.C.'s City Paper in 1987.
While this means that anyone's obsession with violent Honk Kong martial arts movies can not be shared among large internet corporations like Facebook, Netflix will give its customers the opportunity to turn off the sharing feature.
'We are pleased that the Senate moved so quickly after the House,' a Netflix spokesperson told TPM in a statement.
We plan to introduce social features for our US members in 2013, after the president signs it.'
Netflix has been attempting to allow its users to link their Netflix and Facebook accounts since 2011 to allow friends to share online the movies they have watched.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
OooKaaay?
NetFlix does not have my FB email, so they will do this how?
And if they did share ALL this info, why would I care?
If I am watching something I don’t think my kids and grandkids should know about, I have problems way beyond my friends knowing.
Thank goodness Netflix didn’t have a lot of pornography, eh?
Create a bogus secondary FB account.......end of a non-existant problem.........
The article also says that Netflix customers will have the option to turn off the sharing feature so the information is contradictory. Like with Facebook and its endless changing of privacy rules and changes, any customer should approach something like this with caution and read the fine print carefully and check account settings frequently.
I got a year’s subscription as a gift Christmas 2011 and think it’s great.
So much so that I’ve re-upped on my own dime.
I could not imagine being on Facebook.
When it first started, I had a page—but got rid of it as soon as I could figure out how to do it.
They’ll do it with cookies, the same way everything else shares with FB.
Who does what with cookies?
There are no connections between the accounts, because sign ins and emails are different, as well as setting up cookies to deactivate with sing out.
But again, if watching something so embarrassing on NetFlix would be an issue for my kids, and grandkids to know, I have bigger issues than who else knows.
Farcebook is evil .. read the EULA, people !
If you log into FB on your computer and you haven’t added some serious privacy addons to your browser there’s a cookie on your computer with all your FB logon information. It’s how you can go back to FB without having to re-login. Now if you’re on any other website that has a FB Share button they use that cookie to post what you shared on your wall. Netflix will do the same thing. Now if you clean it all up then you’ll have to login for the sharing, if you don’t though that’s how it works.
Yeah I don’t see what the big deal is. I suppose if somebody has been on FB for a really long time, back to when they had porn, there could be stuff in their history they’d be upset with. But of course since it’s all voluntary anyway then they should just opt out.
I have no idea if my Netflix is being shared nor do I care. I feel more sorry for the Facebook (I don’t have a Facebook account so this seems moot) idiots that would WANT to know what I rent.
I’ve never used face book
At this time, I don’t think facebook really makes that much difference. Government already has ability to know all about us.
We have a big family. We share Netflix. I crack up when I get messages from Netflix saying:
We hope you enjoyed watching “Big Bird and Friends” and “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” Care to review them?
That was a fun one to explain away. Then of course after I changed the password, I was considered the bad guy.
no wonder they are all X's
“I got a year’s subscription as a gift Christmas 2011 and think it’s great.
So much so that I’ve re-upped on my own dime.”
Have you found a way to list ALL their films? There are a lot that don’t appear on their site.
I have recently stumbled across some quite graphic soft-core stuff on Netflix.
Didn’t actually watch it, of course...
Alot of people don’t seem to care much about this...not sure why.
Per the article, the original law stemmed from a leaking of Robert Bork’s rental history. Ten bucks says the leak was meant to embarass him somehow.
And I can see a nexus...you rent too many conservative films...well lets just say you make a list. Remember, according to DHS, conservatives are domestic terrorists. Remember the DOJ just arrested a guy for making the ‘wrong’ movie.
I don’t like it at all.
Just last week a map of registered gun owners showed up in the paper. How about a list of all the people who rented ‘Obama’s America’...put up on some website, for SEIU thugs to utilize in fulfillment of their monthly tire slashing quota. (as a side note, a co-worker’s son crossed the picket line at Goodyear once...and they apparently followed him home, and slashed his tires in the middle of the night...so its not hyperbole, the thugs really do this).
I think its a terrible idea. And, I don’t think it matters if you have a facebook account or not. Facebook probably has a ‘shadow account’ running on most of us, data mining for information to sell to ad companies. Their reach is amazing, really. I have an account set up purely to watch my kids’ activity (they know I’m watching and they have to let me be a ‘friend’ as a condition of use). I get ‘you might know this person’ notices about people I barely know. It may be a person I e-mailed ONCE, from my work account. It may be a person I have only communicated with via TELEPHONE. It may be a person I never communicated with, but we were both included in the ‘to’ line of a blast e-mail. Facebook uses alot of computing power to find any string of continuity or overlap. And you can bet that, even if you don’t have a facebook account, if you rent a movie about cowboys, the ads on the sidebar of soem web-sites will start to show you cowboy hats...somewhere in the background Facebook has got your number.
Agree. If any of my friends are judgmental enough to be upset about what I watch then so be it. I don’t live life for the approval of others.
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