jasonadamyoung
commented
12 years ago From email re: knappsack sent to engineering 9/29/2011
I've made my case that I think that the sharing widgets represent privacy issues for our audience. I have ancillary concerns about page load times, ceding control of the visual display to the third-party service, and the technical hoops we have to jump through for managing that display (basically for Facebook only).
I have particular concerns with the Facebook Like widget - but I probably should have as great a concern for the Google +1 widget. I think my concerns with the latter are muted somewhat since recent editions of the widget promote sharing with additional context. I'm probably also concerned with the personal observations of Facebook's advertising behavior with sites I've read while logged into Facebook, and with them being in the news this week.
While in our last meeting we said "we'll do the widgets" - I honestly haven't heard anyone give significant voice to why - other than some room understood "we should do everything we can to facilitate sharing"
My only reason why is that the presence of the widgets encourages sharing (not necessarily by facilitating it, again, I perceive the sharing we really care about likely isn't initiated by the widget).
I feel that the authenticated account preferences strikes a balance between having the widgets and setting ourselves apart in giving some control back to our customers.
Since code is law, the current implementation has all accounts seeing sharing widgets. In the interest of pushing us to resolve it, when I return, I plan on implementing the following.
) Preference based sharing controls (per widget, to answer Daniel's question) ) No sharing widgets for unauthenticated access [1] *) Opt-in sharing widget control for authenticated access.
The idea is "if people want them, they can have them" but we are setting ourselves apart by not forcing them on people.
I'm willing to change my coding plans to have it be opt-out for both unauthenticated and authenticated users. But I want to hear/read someone making a case for that.
Jason
We will get a request to implement sharing widgets. It didn't make the cut by BYOC.
The sharing widget feature raises the same issues in Knappsack ( extension/knappsack#24 ) - in Knappsack we fell back by default to implementing them in a private way - below is the email setting up that decision.
It may be worth revisiting this proposed implementation in Learn should we get closer to an implementation there.