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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

tangentially related: I do not know if people have figured this out yet: liking something gives them permission to write to your status feed. I think after that gets widely understood people will be less promiscuous with the thumbs up, because it will be associated with being spammed to heck.

I have done this to myself, incidentally, because I did not believe the doc tha said it was possible.

If you include Open Graph tags on your Web page, your page becomes equivalent to a Facebook page. This means when a user clicks a Like button on your page, a connection is made between your page and the user. Your page will appear in the "Likes and Interests" section of the user's profile, and you have the ability to publish updates to the user. Your page will show up in same places that Facebook pages show up around the site (e.g. search), and you can target ads to people who like your content.

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Worse yet, if your friends like something or run an app, they can get to your personal information because your friend has endorsed something.

This means either cutting your friends out of your private data, selecting your friends based on their computer savvy, or being as vulnerable as the most insecure of them.

I say again: Facebook is the devil. It's a brilliant platform that should continue to grow for years. It uses your own friends to make you do things you would not normally do (like join). As a platform it has no other goal than total domination of the net.

Can you link to the Facebook developer docs for this? I've been playing with their api and haven't seen anything like this, just getting name and uid of friends. Not saying your wrong, just curious.

Simply liking something does not let a developer get access to your friend list. You will have to give the app at least basic permission (aka "run/install", which will share your friend names and uids) or extended permissions will get you friend's feed, statuses,birthdays, contact details etc. But extended perms have really poor conversions, so most spammers don't go that far.

Only a matter of time before that gets clickjacked though.

"... Worse yet, if your friends like something or run an app, they can get to your personal information because your friend has endorsed something. ..."

Most don't understand this. It's a royal pain. Read through this article by PJF, "Facebook privacy - Instant personalisation and connections" ~ http://pjf.id.au/blog/?position=604

If you have any personal information that you're uncomfortable with the outside world knowing, don't put it on Facebook.

From your description in another comment, it seems like you've used 'status feed' when the more appropriate term is 'news feed.' As far as I can tell you're not saying that the companies can post public statuses; you're saying they show up in your personal news feed. There's a big difference.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

I don't speak the Engrish, sorry. It is whatever you call the big freaking div where Aunt Sally discovered a FarmVille cow and wants to share.

As always with Facebook, if you put in a bit of effort those things can be hidden from view forever.

Mouse-over the big freaking div, click on the little cross on its top right, and choose "Hide FarmVille" or "Hide Mafia Wars" or "Hide Doomaflotchie Widget", and you'll never see any updates from the damn thing again. Across computers. Which makes it better than Greasemonkey scripts or browser addons.

I've been through the Facebook API docs many times and don't recall reading about this.

If thats true it really needs to be better communicated by Facebook.

I had your reaction. Trust me on this, it works. I would tell you to like BCC so that I can spam you to prove it, but I took off my like buttons right after figuring it out. I thought it was a huge violation of my users' expectations, which I had been explaining as "Like this and your friends on Facebook will see it."

I can confirm too. A few months ago when Facebook pushed to convert everybody's "likes & interests" into "Like <page>" things, I initially agreed to it, to see what happened. What started happening was that my News Feed began to fill up with spammy events/messages being pushed out from all the things I Like-d. Bands, movies, books, TV shows, etc. The problem was it became much harder to see "real" events/activities from the people I was connected to, friends and coworkers, etc. So I went in and de-Liked all of it.

Make a bookmarklet with this code:

  javascript:(function(){try{var%20url=encodeURIComponent(location.href);var%20ifr=document.createElement('iframe');ifr.style.position='absolute';ifr.style.top=10+'px';ifr.style.left=10+'px';ifr.style.width=450+'px';ifr.style.height=100+'px';ifr.style.border='none';ifr.src='http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href='+url+'&show_faces=true&width=450&action=like&colorscheme=light';ifr.scrolling='no';ifr.frameborder=0;document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0].appendChild(ifr);}catch(e){}})();

Then you can visit any webpage and "like" it.

I think the confusion centers around the phrase "liking something gives them permission to write to your status feed." I first read that as "liking something gives them permission to publish updates as you." Which is similar to how some apps will get permission to publish as you, but what I believe the author means, is that liking will let the liked page publish their own updates, and you will see them in your personal feed.

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