Facebook's Auto-Play Videos Chew Up Expensive Data Plans

Another good reason to be annoyed by autoplaying videos online: it eats up dataplan allowances, making for some rude surprises. I'm always nervous about data allowances, and sites should be cautious about what they shove at you; turning off the autoplay feature isn't hard (and it's explained in the second article linked above), but I sure wish it was the default setting, or at least caught and handled by a browser extension. (Perhaps this is a job for Social Fixer's next iteration.) Is Facebook the worst offender on this front?

Comments

Slashdot dups also chew up expensive data plans

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't we seen this news a few days ago already?

Slashdot chews up expensive data plans...

[guruevi]

...with auto-dupes of last week's stories

get F.B. Purity

[melios]

F.B. Purity is available as an addon or GreaseMonkey script and already has the option to disable autoplay, among other things.

Re:get F.B. Purity

[thegarbz]

Or you could just change the Facebook settings without downloading additional crap.

autoplay sucks anyway

[ihtoit]

it kicks the snot out of the loadtime for the rest of the page as it seems to want to buffer the entire fucking stream first, I tend to go find myself another source. If slashdot ever decided to pull this shit, I'd go find a privately hosted nerd site. Or build my own. With blackjack and hookers.

Re:autoplay sucks anyway

[I'm New Around Here]

They're publicly traded which means their every thought must be about how to make more money for the shareholders.

Why does this FUD still get mentioned? It is bogus misinterpretation of a court case. Please stop repeating it.

Re:autoplay sucks anyway

[I'm New Around Here]

No, they must try to make a profit, if that is what the corporation is for. Not all are. But the specific wording I objected to was:

They're publicly traded which means their every thought must be about how to make more money for the shareholders.

There is nothing saying that larger profits are the only thing a corporation can think about or focus on. If that were the case, every time a corporation gave to charity, or used company resources (money, vehicles, personnel, publicity, etc.) to sponsor an event, they would be sued by the stockholders for ignoring their fiduciary duty.

So, no, the fiduciary duty of a corporation, and its directors, is not simply about making as much profit as possible for their stockholders. The court case that settled this, and that people refer to without having read it, basically states the exact opposite of kelemorv4's claim. Your definition of fiduciary duty is simply that, a definition of a term. Not how it is applied in the business world, or in all the countries with their own differing laws.

Not a problem for me

[Mishotaki]

It's not a problem for me, I use Opera 12, i need to click to activate plug-ins before they even get downloaded from the site!

Re:Not a problem for me

[ledow]

Same here.

Stop whinging about your browser allowing shit and treat data from the Internet as untrusted and unable to initiate actions without your explicit consent.

Let me get this straight

[93 Escort Wagon]

Facebook slurps up all your personal information and sells it to advertisers. It also slurps up all your friends' and family members' information - even if they aren't on Facebook themselves - keeps it in so-called "shadow profiles", and sells that to advertisers as well. Facebook also routinely changes its privacy controls without notice, and the new versions of the controls default to the most permissive settings - so you have to continually monitor them to "minimize" (in quotes because it's still a lot) how much of your personally identifiable information leaks out to the world at large. And they occasionally make policy changes that force you to share stuff that you'd previously tried to keep confined to within a small group.

And what you're worried about is they might use more of your data plan?

Re:Let me get this straight

[ArcadeMan]

Data plans have an immediate cost at the end of the month.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Rick Zeman]

Data plans have an immediate cost at the end of the month.

Not everyone has a data cap. Does that invalidate the parent's point? Nope, didn't think so.

Pay For Ad Free

[Frosty Piss]

I paid Slashdot $5 or $10 a few years ago, and have't seen an ad since.

Yet more addons that fix hipster design fuckups.

[Anonymous Coward]

Back when I first started using Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox years back, one of its best features was its extensibility. It was easy to install and write addons that could drastically improve the browsing experience.

These addons were almost always adding useful functionality. Firebug is a great example of this, where it makes Firefox much more useful for web developers. I'd also installed other addons that added new functionality to Firefox, like the ability to take screenshots of entire web pages.

These days, though, more and more of the addons I'm installing aren't to add useful functionality to Firefox, but just to fix really fucking stupid design decisions made by hipsters. The UI of Firefox, starting with Firefox 4, has continually gotten worse and worse. Now I have to install a handful of addons to undo these idiotic UI changes. It got even worse when Australis was forced upon us.

Thankfully I don't use Facebook, but if I did, this would be yet another addon I'd have to install that doesn't really improve the browsing experience, it just helps avoid stupidity forced upon us by some hipster designers over at Facebook.

Something is seriously wrong when I have 2 or 3 addons that add useful custom functionality to Firefox, but then another 10+ addons that just fix asinine UI changes made by the Firefox devs, or that block asinine website functionality like auto-playing videos. Seriously, these hipster designers need to go. Everything they touch ends up much worse off.

IMO this is a good thing

[mysidia]

Don't get me wrong.... I hate video autoplay.

But I feel that things like this will ultimately result on pressure on carriers to correct the real problem: The dataplan allowances are way too low, AND 1 Gigabyte of data is priced way too high.

So by having autoplay..... ordinary folks will be using more data, BUT they're not going to want to pay a lot, so there is going to be pressure on carriers to increase data allowances

Re:IMO this is a good thing

[mysidia]

Or pressure on the customers to pay more. Guess which one is automatic?

This is why it's so important to make sure there can't be any major mobile carriers doing any further consolidation and buying out of competition. Customers should be free to move away from carriers that will want them to pay more.

Re:Autoplay is EVIL

[GNious]

Why is it any more evil than animated GIFs? Both play automatically, neither happen with sound, and compression on x264 is *way* better than with animated gifs.

I was initially opposed to autoplay on FB, but after thinking about it, I changed my mind. We already see tons of animated stuff on web pages, and the videos from people who show up on my page about are usually things I'd find interesting (if the user posting them didn't usually post interesting things, I'd have stopped following them). There's no unexpected sounds to bug me, and the quality to size ratio versus animated gifs is, what, two orders of magnitude better?

1) I suspect videos tend to be larger than Anim-GIFs by an order of magnitude
2) Anim-GIFs do not have any sound, while video tend to have sound (ie. more data transferred even if muted during playback)
3) Modern browsers have options for disabling auto-play of Anim-GIF, while similar control for video might be up to a 3rd party plugin

Note how Google can use Anim-GIFs as a preview for YouTube videos on Google+ - I'm thinking they aren't doing this because it is fun.

Turn off Facebook video autoplay

[trawg]

If you're logged into Facebook, this link should take you straight to the settings page where you can disable the auto-playing of videos:

https://www.facebook.com/setti...

This should work for most people - although my brother (on Mac OS X) was not able to see the 'Videos' sub-menu (which for me appears in the list on the left at the very bottom).

I only use the FB website on my mobile (the constant addition of new permissions turned me off the app), and am not sure if you can disable it within the app.

Got in Trouble at Work

[nephorm]

I got in trouble at work because of this feature. I had facebook open in a tab, and I didn't notice that it was autoloading videos in the background. My job doesn't care if I do some personal browsing during the day, but we have bandwidth limits... I was way, way, way over the limit. Lesson learned.