I logged onto CNN.COM and immediately noticed my friend’s name next to a CNN headline. What? After some confusion, I realized that CNN has installed Facebook’s Open Graph Plug-in. This article will explain it better than I will, but I’ll try any way. My friend must have indicated that she had ‘liked’ a particular article by ‘sharing’ it on FB. CNN allows FB to populate a box on its home page. I logged onto FB and FB was able to tell that one of my friends had liked a CNN article and populated a ‘popular on Facebook’ box with her name and the fact that she had shared the article ((along with other information that was of no interest to me whatsoever, for example 11 thousand people on FB had shared this article).
Now, my friend had voluntarily decided to make this information about her reading habits public to her FB friends, and I would have seen this info anyway the next time I logged onto FB, but somehow I felt a little creeped out by this – as we hurtle ever closer to the scene in ‘Minority Report’ where Tom Cruise is being chased in the shopping mall, and the talking advertisements almost blow his cover.