Just as Neil Richards’s The Perils of Social Reading (101 Georgetown Law Journal 689 (2013)) is out in final form, Netflix released its new social sharing features in partnership with that privacy protector, Facebook. Not that working with Google, Apple, or Microsoft would be much better. There may be things I am missing. But I don’t see how turning on this feature is wise given that it seems to require you to remember not to share in ways that make sharing a bit leakier than you may want.
Apparently one has to connect your Netflix account to Facebook to get the feature to work. The way it works after that link is made poses problems.
According to SlashGear two rows appear. One is called Friends’ Favorites tells you just that. Now, consider that the algorithm works in part by you rating movies. So if you want to signal that odd documentaries, disturbing art movies, guilty pleasures (this one may range from The Hangover to Twilight), are of interest, you should rate them highly. If you turn this on, are all old ratings shared? And cool! Now everyone knows that you think March of the Penguins and Die Hard are 5 stars. The other button:
is called “Watched By Your Friends,” and it consists of movies and shows that your friends have recently watched. It provides a list of all your Facebook friends who are on Netflix, and you can cycle through individual friends to see what they recently watched. This is an unfiltered list, meaning that it shows all the movies and TV shows that your friends have agreed to share.
Of course, you can control what you share and what you don’t want to share, so if there’s a movie or TV show that you watch, but you don’t want to share it with your friends, you can simply click on the “Don’t Share This” button under each item. Netflix is rolling out the feature over the next couple of days, and the company says that all US members will have access to Netflix social by the end of the week.
Right. So imagine you forget that your viewing habits are broadcast. And what about Roku or other streaming devices? How does one ensure that the “Don’t Share” button is used before the word goes out that you watched one, two, or three movies on drugs, sex, gay culture, how great guns are, etc.?
As Richards puts it, “the ways in which we set up the defaults for sharing matter a great deal. Our reader records implicate our intellectual privacy — the protection of reading from surveillance and interference so that we can read freely, widely, and without inhibition.” So too for video and really any information consumption.