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Comment by malenm | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little surprised that after inspecting each plugin and finding:

"the first 3 plugins work well and do remove the Timeline after the user logins to Facebook. There is no suspicious activity."

that the final conclusion is:

"In conclusion, we would like to warn all Facebook users to not try any Facebook Timeline Remover apps or plugins."

Why take issue with an unsuspicious app that works as advertised? It's a little unfair to the people who built these apps.

Aside from the general privacy concern presented by every single FB / smartphone app which has access to some level of your personal data, it seems like this is being too specific in its claim that "Timeline removal apps are scams."

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>Why take issue with an unsuspicious app that works as advertised?

  #include <closed_sw_boilerplate_warning.h>

Because you can't prove that the app isn't doing something suspicious. You know what it purports and appears to do, and you know that it needs access to your activity on facebook.com. Even then, it has an auto update mechanism, so even if it isn't doing something untoward now, it easily could in the future without you being the wiser.

Knowing how much of the average user's life is detailed on Facebook, it's one thing that deserves extra scrutiny when it comes to allowing randoms to have access to it.

This was exactly my point - the fact you can't prove that the app isn't doing something suspicious is true of every app. Yes, there are a lot of personal details on Facebook. There are on your phone, too. These are not Timeline-removal app-specific.

Yesterday, there was a post on Hacker News about the Wolfram Alpha Facebook Analytics [1] with very little concern about privacy (3 comments out of 104 mention privacy). My issue with this post is that it needlessly targets Timeline removal apps when it just seems to be making a general statement about being careful when installing any app.

[1]http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/08/wolframalpha-personal...

Understood, but they took the time to compare all of the ones available in the chrome store, and roughly half of them (!) were requesting permissions they absolutely didn't need to function. That is worthy of mentioning, IMHO.

Lazy developer or spyware?

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