Facebook Sharing User Info with Third-Party Companies

A little bit of a heads-up for all of us who use Facebook and don't enjoy telemarketers being on a first-name basis with us. Facebook is going to go ahead with their plan to sell user contact info to third-party companies. I'm not quite sure how I feel about this, but I've decided to do the only reasonable thing. . . change my address and phone number(s) to the following:

156 University Ave.
Palo Alto, CA 94301-1605
Phone: 650-543-4800
Fax: 650-543-4801

(That would be the address of Facebook's headquarters.

)

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Comments

SephStorm

Thanks for the info. While I never filled out most of that personal info, I just did...

What I find amazing is that people are willing to accept that facebook constantly turns off a feature, re-enables it, and promises to "consider" changes. Any other company would turn it off, consider changes, make changes, then turn it back on. What this does is allows FB to make money off of the sale of sensitive information until they can "restrict it properly".

SteveLord

All I care about...is that I can post things like "is sad..." and dozens of my friends will flock to my page and ask "what's happened?!?!?!" How else would I get attention? Sheesh.

dynamik

I'm more concerned that random websites can tie into their API and access my info if I'm logged in. I went to Pandora and the music I typically listen to surprisingly started to play before I logged in. Then I noticed it was pulling songs from albums I "liked" on Facebook. While that was kind of cool in this particular instance, I was more concerned about the broader implications. I then noticed Photobucket also used that feature, and that was the end of browsing while logged into Facebook. I now use a dedicated VM just for that. I don't post anything anywhere that I consider to be terrible, but there is some NSFW material that I find to be humorous that I would prefer to be semi-anonymous and not directly associated with my personal profile.

Facebook: Done is better than perfect.

Facebook HTTPS: Is Done Better Than Perfect? - F-Secure Weblog : News from the Lab

tiersten

dynamik wrote: »

I'm more concerned that random websites can tie into their API and access my info if I'm logged in. I went to Pandora and the music I typically listen to surprisingly started to play before I logged in. Then I noticed it was pulling songs from albums I "liked" on Facebook. While that was kind of cool in this particular instance, I was more concerned about the broader implications. I then noticed Photobucket also used that feature, and that was the end of browsing while logged into Facebook. I now use a dedicated VM just for that. I don't post anything anywhere that I consider to be terrible, but there is some NSFW material that I find to be humorous that I would prefer to be semi-anonymous and not directly associated with my personal profile.

Turn off their app platform and you won't get this issue. I don't have or care about any of the stupid apps or linkages into other platforms so I turned it off long ago. The various official phone Facebook apps have their own private interface into Facebook so you can continue to use those.

The option to disable their app platform doesn't appear until you actually remove every app linked to your account.

MentholMoose

The article is vague, very vague, so I read the source:
https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/446

You have to grant access for your phone/address info to applications, so if you don't want that info shared, simply opt to NOT share it.

-DeXteR-

I Admire Mark Zuckerberg

Just as he says " IF u had invented FB , u would have been the Owner By now and not just sitting over their and spreading the S-word Evrywhere

dynamik

tiersten wrote: »

Turn off their app platform and you won't get this issue. I don't have or care about any of the stupid apps or linkages into other platforms so I turned it off long ago. The various official phone Facebook apps have their own private interface into Facebook so you can continue to use those.

The option to disable their app platform doesn't appear until you actually remove every app linked to your account.

I don't have time to keep up with this garbage; I'd rather not use it

I literally have a FB account to play Scrabble with people on my iPhone. I thought I had everything disabled, but that appears to be a new addition (from when I checked last, which might have been over a year). Interestingly, I only had Bing and Pandora enabled, so I'm not sure how Photobucket was able to work with it. I was also surprised to see how much of my information could be accessed through my friends' interaction with other apps, etc. I have a few people who are social media whores, so that's kind of disturbing as well.

tiersten

dynamik wrote: »

I literally have a FB account to play Scrabble with people on my iPhone.

Ah. If you do want to play games or whatever then you can't turn off their app platform.

dynamik wrote: »

I thought I had everything disabled, but that appears to be a new addition (from when I checked last, which might have been over a year). Interestingly, I only had Bing and Pandora enabled, so I'm not sure how Photobucket was able to work with it.

They've got an option in privacy regarding sharing data with other sites and unsurprisingly, when they added this "feature" it defaulted to on. If you turn that off then it'll fix your current issue. Until they add something else anyway...

As for the original topic, it is as MentholMoose said and part of the regular app data mechanism. An app can request these extra pieces of information now as another permission flag. If you don't want an app knowing this information then either don't use that app or don't fill it in on your profile.

One thing that you do need to check is what current permissions are granted for your apps. Whenever they update their app platform permissions, they generally don't alter already set ones. Some of the earliest apps had permissions for everything and even if they've reduced the requested permissions then your existing install won't change. Remove and readd the app if so in this case and it'll get the new permission set.