Hulu Is Disabling Facebook Auto-Sharing
Hulu has decided to stop its users from oversharing.
The Internet TV site will soon no longer allow users to automatically feed their viewing activity directly into Facebook. Instead, to let your peeps know you’re bingeing on “The Bachelorette” or “Hell’s Kitchen” you’ll have to manually post it.
Hulu insists it is making the change based on the way the majority of people use the site — not because of any disagreement with Facebook, the world’s largest social service with more than 1 billion users. The company last year introduced autosharing to Facebook, which users have had to opt to turn on.
“After observing how our viewers have used this feature, feedback indicated that people prefer the experience of expressly sharing content, and that’s the direction we’re moving in now,” the company says in a new post in the “help” section of its site.
Other Internet services that allow auto-sharing of activity to Facebook include Netflix and Spotify. In fact, to get into the Facebook queue, Netflix had to lobby Congress to change a 1988 law forbidding video-rental services from disclosing customers’ activity. That law, the Video Privacy Protection Act, passed after Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s video rental history was disclosed to the media.
Last week, Hulu’s parent companies — 21st Century Fox, Walt Disney Co. and Comcast’s NBCUniversal — called off plans to sell the company outright and said they will invest $750 million in Hulu. However, the media congloms are still entertaining the possibility of bringing in Time Warner Cable or another equity investor as a part owner.
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