Reader Roll Opt Out

I’ve voiced my feelings about opt in versus opt out. I am a fan of ‘user friendly opt-out’ which I defined in this post.

One of the concerns I’ve heard voiced about MyBlogLog and their reader roll is that there is no easy way to opt out of the reader roll. Mike Arrington put it this way:

Still, I turned off the data collection and display feature for my
account at MyBlogLog. I guess I haven’t gotten so used to the notion
that all of our privacy is already dead that I am comfortable seeing my
name and sites I’ve visited on a publicly available website.

So for now I am enjoying seeing what sites everyone else is visiting (and I love the fact that this person is a TechCrunch reader), but I’m not going to give away the sites that I visit just yet.

To be honest, this never bothered me, but it bothered a bunch of people I know and so it was a big issue. Last night I saw how the MyBlogLog team addressed it and I think its a classic case of "user friendly opt out".

Check out the reader roll on the right side of this blog post. See the X next to my face. I took that screenshot from the TechCrunch reader roll just now. You will see that X everytime you mouse over your face on any reader roll. You click the X and you are opted out of that page’s reader roll until you opt back in. You will know that you are opted out because the next time you visit that page you (and only you) will see your face with the X in it without the mouse over. If you click the X again, you opt back in.

That’s seamless, easy, obvious opt out. The way all opt outs should work.

Well done MyBlogLog.