Facebook Privacy and Apps

October 31st, 2011
facebook, privcy
Facebook's privacy system for apps is tricky. The basic system is opt in for specific apps, and opt out for apps overall. If a specific app wants to access facebook as you, it has to ask for specific permissions:

I think they do a pretty good job with this: they force the app to specify which things it wants to do, and they explain them pretty well. I would like it if I could tell facebook "automatically accept on my behalf as long as it's not going to post or publish as me," because while I don't care about privacy I don't like apps putting spam in people's newsfeeds.

There's a lot of information that your friends have access to that the general public does not. An app approved by one of your friends can access that information. This is how my comment widget works: it runs as me, and so can see your comments. The only way to keep friends' apps from seeing your stuff is to opt out of the facebook platform. When I pull all comments on a post, I don't see comments made by users who have done this. They show up when I'm on facebook, but not through the api. This does disable facebook chat, though, so its kind of annoying.

This came up because someone was worried that my comment widget would help people connect their facebook account to their offline persona. I ended up adding their userid to an internal blocklist because they didn't want to turn off chat. If you'd like me to exclude your comments from my comments page, I could add you to the blocklist too.

Comment via: google plus, facebook

Recent posts on blogs I like:

A Big Problem With The Going To Bed Book

One day my dad was reading this book called the "Going to Bed Book" to my sister Nora. The book is basically about a bunch of animals who are getting ready for bed on a boat. They go down the stairs, take a bath, hang their towels on the wall, find…

via Lily Wise's Blog Posts September 18, 2023

Investing in boundaries with young kids

Putting in some work to get the behavior you want The post Investing in boundaries with young kids appeared first on Otherwise.

via Otherwise August 15, 2023

Self-driving car bets

This month I lost a bunch of bets. Back in early 2016 I bet at even odds that self-driving ride sharing would be available in 10 US cities by July 2023. Then I made similar bets a dozen times because everyone disagreed with me. The first deployment to pot…

via The sideways view July 29, 2023

more     (via openring)