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Comment by ghayes | Hacker News Reader

The issue here isn't with Facebook privacy. If I guess (or you tell me) your bank's online login information, does that give me the right to log-in to your account and start mucking with things? Facebook has an API to access your account through OAuth and Graph; Spotify should never login on your behalf.

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That would be illegal (highly illegal actually). It should also be illegal to do what Spotify is doing, but I'll go out on a limb and say that they won't be held accountable. People have gone to jail for incrementing IDs in GET variables, accessing Facebook accounts without permission and installing apps goes way way beyond that.

I agree that it seems illegal.

We have thousands of usernames and passwords for users on our services. If we then tried using these to log into our users facebook accounts in order to install an app of ours we'd be rightly prosecuted. Yet this is exactly what Spotify are doing.

No, it's not.

Ok, if we added some text saying 'Login with Facebook' to our login form and then did the above it would be exactly what Spotify are doing. And still illegal.

Spotify aren't "logging into the users account" as suggested, the user is signing in with their fb details and by adding an app to their account fb reactivates their account. The issue here is only one of poor communication, not of illegal account access. Saying otherwise is disingenuous.

Spotify uses a private Facebook API that FB gave them access too.

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