Starting Today, Facebook Apps Can Ask You To Hand Over Your Email Address | Hacker News Reader

Starting Today, Facebook Apps Can Ask You To Hand Over Your Email Address

techcrunch.com

17 pointsicey21 comments

TC title: Starting Today, Facebook Apps Can Ask You To Hand Over Your Email Address

HN title: Starting Today, Facebook Apps Can Require You To Hand Over Your Email Address

There's a difference.

From the first paragraph: "Today, Facebook is granting developers on Platform the ability to request (or require) users to hand over their email addresses so they they can send periodic messages directly to users." (Emphasis added)

So it's up to the developer whether it's optional or not.

Also see the Facebook wiki for more info:

http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Roadmap_Email

TC changed "Require" to "Ask" in their headline after icey posted it here. Lighten up.

Sorry, the post was only 5 minutes old when I said that, seemed a narrow window to change in. My bad.

I submitted via the bookmarklet, I don't change the titles at all. I have, however, modified my submission to match the current headline. Sorry for the confusion.

Here is the facebook announcement, http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=355

Applications can request you to share email addresses explicitly via their "extended permission" api...

Its upto the user to share or not...

My curiosity hovers over how much freedom FB app developers have in the "Request for Special Permissions" dialog.

Will the FB API force them to disclose the fact their app wants to email you directly, as is shown in the screencap, or could this fact be obscured with clever word choice or some other diversion in the dialogs?

If the latter, then this new feature sits somewhere close to sanctioned phishing. Once an untrusted 3rd party has your email address, FB can't revoke it. The recent stories about Farmville don't give me much reason to trust such 3rd parties.

Indeed at that point, FB, along with whatever role FB had hoped to play in data-mining the traffic it sends to your address, become entirely irrelevant.

Which begs the question: why does FB chose to cast itself as the easily expendable middleman?

I agree with you, but your use of "begs the question" is wrong, and given that I'm in a pedantic mood (and that this is a mistake I've seen before on HN), I'd like to offer a word on the subject.

Begging the question is a logical fallacy in which you essentially assume your conclusion as part of formulating your argument. Instead, you probably mean something more like "Which brings up the question".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

Fair enough, and thx for the reference. Idiom and logic rarely get along together.

"Raises the question" is a perfectly acceptable usage.

Starting from last week, I changed my facebook email address to a throw away email address. Not as an impressive piece of foresight, however: simply to stop companies finding my facebook details via my email address. Still, I'm especially glad I did now.

I wonder how much it costs Facebook to send all of those application notification emails? It seems this announcement is decentralizing the sending of those emails, and putting the onus on companies.

Yet another move by Facebook to show utter disrespect for their users. Sure, we will all read the dialog before giving away our email address. However, 90% of Facebook's users wont.

Proof: when they updated the privacy settings a few months ago to default to public. Pretty much everyone in my friends list now have their profiles fully public. Craziness.

How is giving people the option to make things public disrespectful?

Because Facebook know very well that people don't read things, they should but they don't, and they take advantage of this. The point is it shouldn't default to public (which it does if you've never touched your privacy settings which previously defaulted to public).

> Because Facebook know very well that people don't read things, they should but they don't, and they take advantage of this.

As far as I'm concerned, if you log into a website, and a modal dialog comes up, and you don't read what it says and just click "yes"... you deserve what you get.

I don't see anything wrong with things defaulting to public, either. Most things you do on the internet are public, or at least associated with your username. Such is life.

When you signed up for Facebook though you signed up under the assumption that your data was private.

Maybe you did. Regardless of assumptions, they threw the options right up there in front of you, and made you choose one. No excuses.

Hellllloooooo Mailinator.

Or just click "Don't Allow".

Or you can use Facebook's proxy option (something like username@proxyemail.facebook.com) so app devs don't actually see your real email address. Same sort of thing that Craigslist does.

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