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Comment by emmett | Hacker News Reader

You are never forced to share a video on Facebook through SocialCam. We ask for the permissions so that it's one-click to share, not so that it will autoshare every time.

Trust me, we use the app all the time and none of us would want it to autoshare.

As for the particular permissions, they all support the basic functionality of the app.

We need your basic info so we can set up your name/picture in your profile

We ask for permanent permission so that we can keep that up to date.

We need to be able to access your friends information so that we can help you find people to follow in the SocialCam.

The reason we ask for each is pretty straightforward. Facebook doesn't have a particularly granular permissions system, so even though we don't use "current cities of your friends" we get it anyway.

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I will never use a service that requires me to use my Facebook login. So while you may have a good reason, remember there are others like me who will never give you a shot because of your tying to Facebook.

We will add independent login in the future. We started with Facebook because it is easy to bootstrap the network, it is where most people want to share their videos anyways, and it allows us to keep the content clean much easier as most people don't want to troll under their own name.

> Trust me, we use the app all the time and none of us would want it to autoshare.

Using "trust me" in part of a response to security or privacy concerns may be a bad idea. :)

In the end, isn't that the only thing you can say? Maybe you can prove something about how secure a service is, but you definitely can't prove you'll respect people's privacy. All you can do is to respect them, and ask for trust.

Au contraire. You can say "You are not required to trust me. We don't ask for personal information nor require you to surrender your Facebook login nor do we demand that you send us a copy of your house keys in the mail."

It is a matter of scale. They are asking you to trust a couple founders of the company whereas you are asking them to trust thousands (potentially millions if they are successful) of users. Better to have Facebook filter out most of the bad actors up front and not pollute their site with spammers, trolls and other shenanigans until Facebook-only login is retarding their growth.

It works the other way around. Facebook is retarding their growth right now, when they can't afford to have it retarded. On the other hand, when they are big, they can afford to make users jump through hoops (and identify themselves).

That's really not true - Facebook, when used properly, can be an astoundingly good driver of growth. If you're not the type who would use Facebook, you're probably not the type of person who will drive their growth anyway, so why should they take away time from optimizing for those users who will?

One could prove that they have a lot to lose (such as reputation) if they break their promise.

I don't think you need the permanent permission just to keep user details up to date. You can use the real-time updates API for that (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api/realtime/)

Am I missing a crucial detail?

By going into the facebook privacy settings for that application, you're allowed to remove some of the individual permissions they ask for. Example: Access to data at all times can be removed individually.

I think I remember this being around since f8 2009. Anyone know for sure when this was introduced?

> We need ... so that we can help "you"

(really means) > we need "your" help to bootstrap the network

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