Mark Zuckerberg had a dream that one day, as The New Yorker described it, users “will read articles, visit restaurants, and watch movies based on what their Facebook friends have recommended, not, say, based on a page that Google’s algorithm sends them to.” Why search when you can follow? And if that dream led to Zuckerberg collecting data from the million sites that enabled the company’s Facebook Connect software, well, who was he to turn it away? Perhaps unsurprisingly, this dream and its tracking dividends did not sit well with Google engineer Brian Kennish. As a response to recent oops-our-bads in the privacy department, Kennish whipped up a little browser extension called “Facebook Disconnect” that strips away Facebook’s integration. It’s only available on Google Chrome, which has pretty quickly managed to corner 12 percent of the market. But don’t chalk this up to the go-get-’em initiative of a dutiful underling. Kennish tells TechCrunch, “Nobody at Google asked or encouraged me to do so, or probably, even knows who I am.” A fat bonus should teach him to check with his superiors first.
Google Engineer Builds Facebook Disconnect [TechCrunch]
