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Facebook privacy fail?

5 points by OmniLarry ↗ HN
Hopefully this will get fixed before it goes live for everybody, but check out either of these links:

http://www.facebook.com/apps_preview http://www.facebook.com/games_preview

assuming you logged in to Facebook. No way to opt out of what gets displayed yet, so you will see what your friends are using, maybe even potentially embarrassing apps. Whoops?

7 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 23.5 ms ] thread
sounddust
You can already visit the page of any app to see what friends are using it, and the app updates are the same as what would appear in the newsfeed. So this page reveals no more additional info than what was already available to you, although it does make the info a bit more accessible.
OmniLarry
True enough. I think the easily accessible part is somewhat important though, at least for apps that you would not look for otherwise - it's like checking if a key exists in hash, vs given a list. For the former, you can find it if you know what to look for, the latter it gives you a free look.
sounddust
In my opinion, it's more like checking if a key exists in a hash, if you know that there's a 99% chance that key hashes to one of 50 possible values.

There are only a few incriminating apps, such as Zoosk (I use "incriminating" in the lightest sense possible of course), and you can just visit the pages for those apps individually.

I've been a pretty harsh critic of Facebook regarding privacy lately (see my previous comments) but I don't think this specific instance is a privacy fail, unless you are arguing that it should be possible to completely prevent people from knowing what apps you use. And that's fine, but app install visibility is one of Facebook's less flagrant privacy violations when you look at the whole picture.

timmorgan
Not being much for Facebook apps myself, I'm trying to think of what might be embarrassing. If I add an app to my FB account, I expect it might make itself known to my friends anyway.
OmniLarry
A good example given by my friend is perhaps a Dating app used by your wife, or your friend who is married.

It's true that you can look it up if you suspect it, but now you don't have to do the digging.

jgrahamc
Did you email Facebook security and tell them?

http://www.facebook.com/security

nfnaaron
How can you tell that that's an official facebook page, and not a joe-random-fan-of-facebook page? It looks like any other individual or entity page.

I run in to this, for example, when I want to be a fan of a band or some other entity. Which of those is the entity's page and which are merely other fans?