Another day, another about-face on privacy by Facebook. Late last week, the world’s most popular social-networking site announced a new policy giving access to users’ addresses and phone numbers to outside developers. On Tuesday, the site announced it was listening to complaints — and would hold off on the access to incorporate some changes.
On the Facebook Developers Blog, Douglas Purday wrote that, following “some useful feedback that we could make people more clearly aware of when they are granting access to the data,” the company agreed to make “changes to help ensure you only share this information when you intend to do so.” He added that the changes will be implemented “as soon as possible,” and, in the meantime, the feature will be temporarily disabled.
Request for Permission Screen
In its announcement Friday, Facebook said user contact information — addresses and phone numbers — would be made available to third-party application developers with the permission of the user. But that permission could be required if users want to participate in particular games or apps.
Facebook said that, if access is granted, developers won’t have access to addresses and phone numbers of the user’s friends.
In explaining the access, the sample screenshot on the Facebook Developer Blog showed a Request for Permission that included both Access to Basic Information and Access My Contact Information, with only one Allow or Don’t Allow button covering both. Many apps and games require that the Allow button be clicked to participate.
Security firm Sophos noted on its company blog that “there are just too many attacks happening on a daily basis which trick users” into allowing such access.
Graham Cluley of Sophos noted there are many “rogue applications” that post spam links to users’ walls, tricking users to participate in fake surveys — some of which request phone…