Life was easy before the new Facebook changes. You can share articles without any hassles with your friends. Now, whenever you click any shared news article on Facebook, you are greeted by an App. You are forced to install it for reading that article. The new installed App with monitor your behaviour and will recommend articles based on your behaviour and from your friends. Also your activities get publish in your timeline without your consent. This can be considered as another infiltration of your privacy by big media conglomerates. Soon they can control what you see and read.

Thankfully, we have Frictionless Chrome extension developed by Google’s ex-software engineer Brian Kennish. This extension will let you view the shared article page directly without installing any app. Effectively it will bypass any of the loops presented by Facebook and take you to the desired article. Since it is a relatively new extension, it might not work with all news sources. However I have found it to work with almost all major news sources such as Washington Post, Huffington Post, Yahoo News, Times of India and NDTV.

Interestingly, the ex-Google employee has another Chrome extension ‘Facebook Disconnect’, which blocks all your data to flow to Facebook servers while visiting other different sites. It also hides like boxes and buttons for easy viewing of the web site.

Install Frictionless from here if you are annoyed by those dialog boxes and are more concerned about your privacy.