…or maybe it’s actually with Facebook privacy settings in general – I’m honestly not sure anymore…
I hardly use any apps at all on Facebook, mainly because I always get a little freaked out when I see the permissions that most apps are expecting me to grant them. And the reason I say that maybe my beef is more with how Facebook designates the permissions is that sometimes I don’t think it’s really very clear what an app intends to do with those rights once you actually grant them to it.
Take for example the very cool Intel The Museum of Me app that I was playing around with earlier this evening…
Now I actually almost didn’t install this app because Post to my Wall stood out to me – I mean, it makes sense that it needs to be able to access everything else because the whole point of the app is to build a custom visualization of your Facebook profile, but why does it need to be able to post to my Wall to do that???
Well, I did let this one slide because I’d heard some really cool things about this (from other folks who are app-shy like myself), and it turns out that this is simply the permission it uses if you choose to share the app on your Wall after using it. The sharing is entirely optional, so it’s not like many where it basically forces you to broadcast that you’ve used it whether you actually wanted to or not.
For me, I guess I’d like to see this kind of thing spelled out – Post to my Wall (user-initiated) vs. Post to my Wall (app-initiated), even though I know that it would never fly because even with the information that’s provided on that screen now, so many people just click Allow without even thinking about it anyways. And that might be ok if apps were being genuine about what they want to do and only asking for permissions for things that they need to make themselves function, but it’s clear from so many that I’ve seen when Access my ________ is listed five different times to provide full access to all of your info that their real goal isn’t to make a cool app, but to make an app worth installing so that they can mine data out of your profile for advertising purposes.
Like looking through my other apps right now – Twitterfeed, which I use simply as an RSS syndicator to announce on both Facebook and Twitter when my new humor columns go up … why does it need access to anything other than Post to my Wall?!
Maybe they justify it by saying that it’s a free service, so collecting my demographics to later monetize is a way to support using the app, but it still just seems kind of sketchy to me. And sure, some of them give the option like you see above to remove certain permissions … although notice which one it is??? Out of all seven of those permissions, the only one available for removal is the one that’s technically required for the app to do what it’s designed to do – post to my Wall!!!
Unless someone at Twitterfeed needs to send me a birthday card or flip through some of my old pictures before they’ll push my RSS feeds out the door, that is. Maybe that’s how this fancy app technology stuff works these days…