Facebook’s recent API changes actually improve privacy for once
Facebook Inc has a long and complicated history when it comes to internet privacy, and more often than not, the company has been accused of all sorts of privacy violations, including claims that the social network violated privacy laws in the European Union.
At Facebook’s F8 conference in 2014, the company announced that it would be answering some of its users’ privacy concerns by shutting down the login and graph APIs that allowed apps to gain data about people’s friends on Facebook, such as their status updates, location, likes, and more. The changes specifically affect apps that allow you to login in with your Facebook credentials, and starting this Thursday, April 30, new developers will be required to use the updated APIs for their apps to function.
“If people don’t feel comfortable using Facebook and feeling comfortable logging into apps, then we don’t have a platform,” Facebook Product Manager Simon Cross said at a recent press briefing in San Francisco.
The new login API gives users greater control over what information third-party apps are able to view. Users can now specifically choose what permissions they want to grant to apps that use Facebook logins, including whether or not they want to allow the apps to access information about their friends list.
While the ability to deny specific permissions may cause errors or entirely break some apps, many others are able to continue functioning without problems. “We’ve spent the last year giving developers a ton of feedback,” Cross said. “We really want developers to make it clear to people how their information will be used.”
For those users who do agree to provide third party apps with data from their friends list, the apps will still only be able to access information about friends who are also using the app.
Facebook’s Graph API received similar updates, as well as a new app-scoped user ID feature that will anonymize the IDs assigned to users who login with their Facebook credentials rather than using their personal ID. However, users who already signed in to the app before the new changes will continue using their previous ID.
photo credit: Ksayer1 via photopin cc
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