Imagine visiting a website and finding that it already knows who you are, where you live, how old you are and who your Facebook friends are, without your ever having given it permission to access that information. If you’re logged in to Facebook and visit some as yet unnamed “pre-approved” sites around the web, those sites may soon have default access to data about your Facebook account and friends, the company announced today.

Barry Schnitt, Senior Manager, Corporate Communications and Public Policy at Facebook, told us in an email that “the right way to think about this is not like a new experience but as making the [Facebook] Connect experience even better and more seamless.” There will be new user controls made available, but this is a new experience: this makes Facebook Connect opt-out instead of opt-in.

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The proposed change was first written about by Jason Kincaid on TechCrunch, who called it Facebook’s Plan To Automatically Share Your Data With Sites You Never Signed Up For.

Here’s the language Facebook used to describe the draft policy:

Pre-Approved Third-Party Websites and Applications. In order to provide you with useful social experiences off of Facebook, we occasionally need to provide General Information about you to pre-approved third party websites and applications that use Platform at the time you visit them (if you are still logged in to Facebook). Similarly, when one of your friends visits a pre-approved website or application, it will receive General Information about you so you and your friend can be connected on that website as well (if you also have an account with that website). In these cases we require these websites and applications to go through an approval process, and to enter into separate agreements designed to protect your privacy.

That sounds downright creepy. It’s nice to have one-click access to your Facebook info if you decide to share it with other sites – that’s what Facebook Connect does – but the prospect of having that information automatically shared when you show up on another website seems like an idea that won’t be well received by users. There’s a big difference between opt-in and opt-out “data portability.”

Schnitt says: “People love personalized and social experiences and that’s why Facebook and Facebook Connect have been so successful. We think there are some instances where people would benefit from this experience as soon as they arrive on a small number of trusted websites that we pre-approve.”

Shnitt is the man who told us in a previous interview about Facebook’s fundamental shift away from being private by default (Why Facebook Changed Its Privacy Strategy) that users generally go along with the company’s default privacy settings because they agree with the company’s recommendations and because the world is changing to be less private. He cited the growth of Twitter, blogging and reality TV as evidence that the world was changing this way and that people are less interested in privacy.

In that interview, Schnitt also acknowledged that business reasons, like pageviews and advertising, were part of why Facebook was transforming away from privacy as well. We asked if this new opt-out Facebook Connect was the first step in a Facebook Ad Network, where your profile on Facebook is used to target ads that Facebook sells on sites all over the web. Schnitt told us, “this has absolutely nothing to do with advertising.”

Do you buy all that?

Do you trust Facebook to select trustworthy websites to automatically share your data with when you browse around the web? If you don’t trust Facebook’s judgement, you will be able to opt-out of exposing that data. But by default you’ll be sharing it.

By default, you’re sharing more and more these days, with more and more people. Perhaps that’s because of your love for Twitter and reality TV, but perhaps its because of Facebook’s cultural and commercial agenda.

Discuss

On the heels of a study indicating that social media can significantly impact a brand’s bottom line positively, another one has come out saying that Facebook is costing companies productivity.

To be more specific, the new independent study from Nucleus Research is saying that Facebook costs companies 1.5 percent of total productivity, and that one in every 33 employees has built their entire profile during work time.

"If your company is facing tight margins and low profitability, as many are now, then how can you accept any work distractions that drain your overall productivity?," asks Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of research for Nucleus Research.

"While it won’t make you popular, restricting Facebook can reclaim lost productivity. If your profitability is say two percent, this could be the difference between staying open or closing shop," says Wettemann.

Here are a few statistics from the study:

- Nearly half of employees in the study and 77 percent of those with an account use Facebook during work hours

- Some employees use Facebook as much as 2 hours per day while at work

-  One in 33 employees use Facebook exclusively while at work

Of those using Facebook at work, the study indicates that 87 percent of them couldn’t define a clear business reason for accessing the site. "Further, the analysis reveals potential security concerns through email, as most organizations do not monitor and manage Facebook as closely as email," says Nucleus in a release. "This creates an opportunity for Facebook users to circumvent controls and violate corporate communications policies."

While there are clearly concerns about employees accessing Facebook and other social networks from work, it is hard to get behind the notion that social network use should be entirely restricted by staff. The study we talked about here, suggests that the most successful brands have dedicated teams using social media. These teams would certainly be able to define "business reasons" for using the site(s). On the other hand, in some cases it appears to be wise to let a broader range of staff participate in online communities on behalf of the company.

It’s really going to come down to a variety of variables. What are your goals? What kind of business are you in? Are your employees responsible? These are the types of questions business owners should be asking themselves when deciding how to approach their social media strategies.

Do you have suggestions for business owners struggling with this issue? Please share your thoughts with WebProNews readers.