Facebook Apps Must Now Ask Users for More Specific Permissions | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Apps Must Now Ask Users for More Specific Permissions

mashable.com

22 pointsxaverius9 comments

This sort of system never seems to work in practice.

Very quickly you get to a point where every app asks for so many permissions it does not need. You end up just "clicking through" the installation without much thought.

Either developers are lazy or just want to be on the safe side.

Every Android app that I have downloaded requests network access (Even simple games do!), contacts access and tons of other capabilities. I suspect most users just learn to ignore these requests and blindly install the application...

You might also not want to murder your MAU by upgrading your app in such a way that your permissions would broaden, causing every user to get BIG SCARY WARNING CLICK TO DENY.

Incidentally, we are seeing -- again -- that people's beliefs about how much they value privacy ("Privacy is important to me: 9 out of 10.") contrast sharply with their actions ("I will give you my email password for a chocolate bar, hehe, sure.").

Good move, but not enough. Though you're now more informed, you still don't have much control over using an app other than deciding whether use it or not. Its not like you can say "this app shouldn't be needing access to my friends birthdays, let me disable that".

You realize that's not really possible right? Apps rely on the permissions they ask you for their core functionality. If it can't post to your wall, for example, to help spread the app, it's not really worth it for you to use up the server's resources.

Not really. The whole Facebook scandal has been exactly about the fact that apps need one thing (usually just your name for display purposes and the ability to write on your wall) but it was taking things like your email, what friends you have and so on.

Why does it need my email if I have all the email sending functionality off (I always do)? The applications could gracefully scale back based on what they can see.

The reason it's not really possible is that most of the advertising revenue being generated around Facebook comes from selling your information.

I guess that's fair. It should be against the TOS to ask for more data than you need, and result in a takedown after a warning.

Quite the 180, Facebook. My data belongs to me is a core belief now?

No, they just want you to bear the responsibility of using third party apps.

Thank Goa. Finally they came up with this.

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