Facebook privacy problem

2015-06-21 20:43:44

I encountered an interesting problem with Facebook's privacy policies---not too little privacy, but too strict a privacy policy.

This cropped up yesterday evening when I tried my luck with programming a Facebook app. In this case, a web app, a web page running a Javascript script that would communicate with Facebook and show information from Facebook on the page.

This took some work: you start by registering as a Facebook developer, and then you register your prospective application. With app id in hand, you can then insert a bit of Javascript boilerplate code into your app, which allows the app to contact Facebook. (The code produces a Facebook login dialog in case the user is not yet logged into Facebook.) It turns out that all of the data in Facebook is organized in a very logical fashion. So with suitable calls to the Facebook API (the library of functions you use to talk to Facebook), you can get the user's name, or the most recent photo they've posted onto Facebook, etc.

But the problem arose when I tried to get my app to give me the names of all of my friends. (I was thinking of writing an app that would give me the most recent posts of all of my friends.) I had no luck getting the code to work; I tried two or three code fragments found on the web (on programming discussion boards). But I eventually learned that the reason the code wasn't working was that Facebook decided that applications would no longer have access to their users' friend lists. The code works but returns nothing. (Actually, apps can return data on friends who are also using the application---if they give the application permission.) This policy, meant to protect Facebook users, came into effect at the end of April of this year.

So my programming efforts were a bit frustrated, although I was glad to learn enough about Facebook's development scheme to get a tiny app to work. But it's good to know that Facebook is actually not as big a horror show on privacy issues for its users as I might have thought.