Want to know every application your friends are using? Thanks to a slight privacy oversight in the new Facebook dashboard, you can view the latest applications that your friends have been using whether or not they want you to. While Facebook will probably resolve this issue before launch, the beta games and applications dashboards are visible to everybody.
As one developer told us, “I may not want my boss to know that I’m playing games during work hours. Or I may not want my friends knowing that I ran the ‘How Perverted are You?’ application.” While I’m not sure that there is really a “How Perverted Are You?” application, he effectively got the point across: you don’t want your friends to know all of your activities. In theory this also means that all of your Facebook Connect activity is visible as well.
When I went to the applications dashboard, I was also able to view an application that one of my friends was currently developing (and had not yet made public). Unknown to that individual, I’m now aware of the latest project they are working on. This new privacy bug has strange similarities to the Beacon fiasco. When users visited websites, notifications of their actions were posted to their profile, sometimes without them being aware.
This Is Not A Minor Bug
In this instance the user is completely unaware that the information is being posted about them. This slight flaw could ultimately damage the future of the application dashboard and delay the deprecation of notifications as well as other items in the current developer roadmap. Will users be prompted to post about their latest activity? Will there be a new opt-out system? The fact that beacon was opt-out was the reason that users were so angry in the first place.
While applications could previously send anonymous notifications (messages that weren’t associated with a friend), the new dashboards are integrated with your personal social graph. None of my friends want to share some of this information though. For example the three friends in the image below, didn’t want me to know that they were using the dating application, “Are You Interested?”
The point is this: this loophole in the new application and games dashboards will require Facebook to head back to the drawing board. While many were expecting the new dashboards to be part of the solution to notifications being deprecated, it’s clear that this could rapidly spawn into a privacy disaster. Facebook should shut off the dashboard for the time being while they work out a solution.
Wouldn’t it be easier in life to just not be on Facebook. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about all this crap. You could do what ever you wanted, you could be free.
Thanks for letting people know about this. Hopefully Facebook fixes this security breach soon.
Yikes! I will be removing all apps if this goes live. I skip all those popup publish windows for a reason.
very bad.. i am leaving applications
Nick,
When I first checked out this new resources, (which I thought would be a great research tool) I discovered how many game applications that my grown daughter was using.
I immediately put on my “judgmental-father” hat and wondered why a mother of two children and a busy college schedule was spending so much time building farms and fish tanks… It was not the information that I was looking for. I think that Facebook might do something better and still have a good resource for developers.
A possible solution is to aggregate or list application users anonymously and allow developers to send a blind message to “all friends using Farming World” or all users of family connection applications..
By the way… Thanks for including our brand in your post!
Bruce
Hey, All Facebook!
My impressions/feedback stats disappeared overnight! What’s up with that? Any word from the FB people?
Maybe Facebook feels it has too much traffic, and wants to drive users away! Facebook is becoming more intrusive every day. Bad enough that sites are encouraging Facebook Connect, I don’t need my friends seeing that I commented on some article/blog/whatever. It’s getting too complicated, every time I do anything on the internet, I have to think about whether I want every single person I’ve ever met to see it.
Privacy (and life in general) was so much better when there was just AIM. You could leave up an away message for days on end - and people had to go out of their way to check it. With Facebook you “push” your status update to your entire network’s feed.
It gets better than this - a little URL hacking and the ID# of a friend list will let you filter friends by someone else’s category - thus seeing all of their friends updates (even if you don’t know them).
In your privacy settings you can set it so others can not see what applications you are going to.
SOooooooooooooooooooo how do we know what our friends are doing (it’s not of curiousity it’s just that i find facebook boring so i want to know what they do)
thanks in advance
Hiya,
I’m a student from Mtskheta (Georgia)
and I have to analyze how much time someone spend on internet.
There are websites which are a guilty pleasure, but there are websites which only have a visits duration of 20 seconds.
I would like to know how much time do you spend on internet (day/week/month).
Thanks for your help!
Nico