Facebook in my Pandora

As part of Facebook's new OpenGraph initiative the site has selected a couple key partners to share information with regarding user's preferences. One of those partners is Pandora, and this weekend while I was listening to my music stations I started noticing the following pop-ups show up on various artists & songs:

Whenever one of my Facebook friends likes the song or artist currently playing on my station, Pandora lets me know with a little image like the one above. Also, I can see a list of stations that my Facebook friends listen to, and I imagine they can see the stations I listen to.

All of this is pretty cool except for one thing: Pandora and Facebook never asked me if it was OK to do this! I don't remember ever telling Pandora to share my music preferences with everyone I know on Facebook. What if I secretly listened to Britney Spears or Miley Cirus and never told my friends about this shameful secret? All of a sudden everyone knows!

This is somewhat of a silly example, but I think it illustrates the privacy concerns around Facebook's OpenGraph initiative and the amount of data that can be shared. Right now you have to actively opt-out of the sharing service instead of having to explicitly opt-in, which is a bit concerning. I wonder if there will be a huge backlash against Facebook just like with the Beacon debacle. Anyways, I'm off to review my Facebook privacy settings to tighten up the information they can share about me with others.