Netflix won't tell your Facebook friends what you're watching

Netflix has bowed to customer pressure and rolled out changes to its recommendation feature that it hopes encourages deeper integration with Facebook accounts.

Users will now be safe to link accounts to Facebook without fear of automatically disclosing every minute of programming they have watched, which is something that has famously discouraged users from linking social media accounts to Netflix ones.

Under the new system, Netflix users will be able to select certain Facebook friends to recommend programming to and this will be sent as a notification through Netflix or as a private message on Facebook.

"There are a lot of people on Facebook that you don't really know that well", said Cameron Johnson, Netflix's director of product development. "If you are really moved by a piece of content and you know someone in your life that would like it, you are going to want them to watch it too, so you can talk about it and get excited about it together".

The move means that recommendations have completely disappeared from Facebook profile pages of Netflix subscribers that have linked the accounts and won't show up on the news feeds of their friends.

Facebook sharing has been a part of Netflix since 2011 around the world except for the US where the company had to persuade lawmakers to revise a certain law before it could allow users to share information on the social network, which eventually happened 18 months ago.

Netflix holds the largest share of the streaming market with 50 million subscribers worldwide that pay a monthly fee to stream films and TV programmes and it is being constantly threatened by the likes of Amazon and Wuaki in what is a highly competition sector.

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Photo Credit: Joe Wilcox