Bridge Over the Cyber-Divide by MikeL: Security Tip for April - Autoplay: Facebook, why is this on by default?

We often accuse our legislators of not keeping up with the rampant changes in technology. The truth is that there is a level of responsibility for both our governments, our technology industry. The problem for the average user is where these monoliths and juggernauts of modern society fail to agree, it is the average user who stands alone to protect themselves.

Take a very recent case of an extremely disturbing post, that police allege is of children being exploited, that was posted to a number of community-based buy-swap-and-sell Facebook groups, in and around the Canberra region over the Easter weekend. (See ABC report at Warning over child exploitation video posted to community Facebook pages ). As the ACT Police have correctly cited, the appropriate action to take if you have seen this post is do not under any circumstances click on the link. Do NOT click the link.

Under current Australian laws, the publishing of child pornography is illegal, but so is the download of such material. For the video to play the user must click on the video link, which will download the video. Once you realise what the video is and even if you stop it - potentially too late. Lesson One; be very careful of what you click on in Facebook. That is your responsibility, and no one else's.

However, there is a gotcha in this for those users of the mobile Facebook App. Video auto-play feature is enabled by default. By default, when you have a major update to Facebook, uninstall and re-install Facebook, or you get a new mobile and Facebook is installed, the default setting is that Facebook will start playing any video content that is in your Facebook News Feed, as soon as you scroll over the post containing it. And for Facebook to start playing the video means that the video content has already been at least partially downloaded to your device.

Under Australian law it is unclear if this would constitute a breech of the law, or if having auto-play enabled would be accepted in court as a mitigating circumstance. From what I am aware of to date, this has yet to be tested in the Australian courts.

Taking Charge of Your Facebook

So the law and the technology companies have put the individual user at risk in Australia. Our governments have proven that they are not ahead of the curve in updating and keeping laws abreast of technology. The tech industry giants such as Facebook are serving a world-wide customer base, of which Australian consumers constitute less than 1%. So we cannot expect either of these parties to rescue the individual from this situation.

However, you can disable the auto-play feature of Facebook yourself. Here's how.