Wendy Davis reports:
Earlier this year, document-sharing service Scribd quietly rolled out the new feature Readcast, which broadcasts the documents people download to other Scribd users.
Despite the well-publicized privacy headaches that this type of feature has caused other companies, Scribd launched Readcast on an opt-out basis. That is, the first time people used Scribd after the Readcast launched, the company showed them a screen allowing them to opt out of posting the document to their public Scribd profiles. If users exited the screen without changing the default settings, the documents they downloaded were added to their public profiles.
The move drew relatively little attention until last week, when Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman wrote about it on his blog.
Read more on MediaPost.
Via @csoghoian.