Where's the option to choose which items get sent? Looks like all or nothing.
The all of nothing mentality is flawed, much like most of Facebook's decisions it seems. (imo)
> Giving line-item veto to a user is a terrible idea.
Giving the user choice about whether or not they want to give up their personal information is a great idea. Suppose I don't want the app to have my email and phone number. Without finer-grained control, my only option is to say no to the entire app -- so they lose me as a user.
Newflash: I don't give a shit about how hard your job as a programmer is. If you don't like programming take up something else. I care about my security and not having to worry about what effect clicking "OK" is going to have. Plenty of apps ask you things that they don't need to function.
Facebook provides value and poor, lazy anti-security undermines that value and puts me in the inconvenient position of thinking of a move [1]. And for what value? So developers don't have to write a switch statement? Seriously?
[1] It's not as simple as "just take your business elsewhere". The only purpose of facebook for me is connecting with friends and family. So going while they all stay is rather pointless. Getting other people, who have a different circle of friends/family, to move with me would be practically impossible.
In other words, it's not really "all or nothing" as much as "whatever this particular app asks for, or pass on this app."
Most users of any service or product won't fully understand every single configuration option available to them. That doesn't mean we should give up on allowing configuration. And using the interface to subtly educate and inform users about their options is a worthy goal. But that doesn't seem to be in Facebook's immediate best interests.
Android also has a similar dialog when downloading/installing new applications that provides "all-or-nothing" control just like this Facebook dialog. I think it's bad there as well.
This has happened. Since most things on the site are an app, Photos is an app. There used to be an option which ultimately disallowed an app to post certain kinds of stories to your stream (I don't recall the details). You could set this option on the Photos app, meaning you would never see any more photo stories in your stream. The option was very buried, so people had to specifically go to Photos and turn on the option... and silly users did this, forgot about it, and then complained that Facebook was broken since they never saw photos stories. Nevermind that it was their own fault. This option has since been removed in one of the Platform permissions revamps recently (IIRC it was simply forced to "off" for all apps, with Photos and similar internal ones special-cased to be forced "on".)
As a developer, you are responsible for asking for the information your app requires to function properly. You are required (by the Facebook TOS) to specify what information you will get, and how you will use it.
The user than has to choose if it is worth it or not, for this particular app.
If Facebook offered the users "more granular control" over what would be sent, this would result in apps not knowing in advance what information would be available to them, which would result in a pretty crappy user experience.