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Where's the option to choose which items get sent? Looks like all or nothing.
I have been wondering that for a while; why isn't there a conditional permissions system that you can choose what gets shared or not. It wouldn't be that hard for app developers to sanity check for what is available or not, and tell the user if it is an issue. The all of nothing mentality is flawed, much like most of Facebook's decisions it seems. (imo)
Where's the option to choose which items get sent? Looks like all or nothing.
Where's the option to choose which items get sent? Looks like all or nothing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. That implies Facebook are offering a way to push your phone number and data into third party apps. What they are infact doing is now allowing third-parties to request extra, and very very personal, information about you using the same dialog that people have effectively now been trained to basically click-through. I really think this dialog needs two things: 1) Something that highlights the fact you are a…
1) The fact that there is a second item below "Access my basic information" would seem to make that fact abundantly clear. I'm not sure how much more explicit it can get. 2) While I agree that it would be good to give users a greater level of control, most apps are unfortunately not designed to play nicely with varying levels of permissions. Such a change would require significant advance notice to Platform developer…
2) it'd actually be quite trivial, no notice required. If the user opts out of sharing a specific type of data, the app just gets an empty entry. Apps already need to deal with the fact a user may not have any photos/friends/whatever-data-they-want-to-access.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I agree that it would be good to give users a greater level of control, most apps are unfortunately not designed to play nicely with varying levels of permissions. Such a change would require significant advance notice to Platform developers. They can obviously live without contact info since they haven't had access to it until now. This is actually an interesting potential solution to the permission dialog pro…
> "They can obviously live without contact info since they haven't had access to it until now." This is such an illogical statement that I'm not quite sure how to respond to it.
However, this really could be quite useful if used legitimately, i.e. Facebook commerce, having shipping address available; location aware apps etc.
Where's the option to choose which items get sent? Looks like all or nothing.
That's half true. It's all or nothing on first use, but you can revoke any non-required permissions later: http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=applications
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "They can obviously live without contact info since they haven't had access to it until now." This is such an illogical statement that I'm not quite sure how to respond to it.
Huh? How can an app depend on access it has never had? Has the app always been broken waiting for this feature?
One of the permissions read: "Send me email" (optional: send through a facebook proxy)
So now, you can also let the apps know phone number through the graph? I don't find that too big of a step. CAN-SPAM still applies. Perhaps they should set up proxies for the phone number, though.
What I find more funny is that ReadWriteWeb writes:
"Thankfully, this sort of information cannot be shared via your friends' careless actions, unlike other profile information."
which is in direct opposition to the attitude that blogs had on the same issue when Google complained that facebook was "trapping your contacts" by not letting you export them. Now they are thankful facebook doesn't do this :)
1) There are UI issues that have been raised elsewhere in this thread - mainly, that users get confused when shown a set of complex options. Having watched usability studies where users are given a lot of relatively complex options, I'd suspect that a model where users have to pick among the permissions to give an app is going to fail massively (ie, user turns on everything without actually understanding anything, turns off everything by default or just cancels out of the app install altogether.) A model where apps request permissions right when it's needed will be annoying users with all the dialogs needed.
2) Some apps don't work if they don't get all the permissions they need (imagine an address book app for an email program - if you don't get email address it just doesn't work.) Adding a lot of conditionals to change how your app works based on what permissions they get can be expensive and adds a lot of unnecessary test cases.
In my opinion, Facebook's decision give more granular permissions, but to make it an all or nothing proposition allows them to protect their users by removing spammy/malicious apps, and simplifies the applications built on their platform . This puts responsibility on them to actively remove malicious applications, and on developers to pick only the permissions they need. Given that users tend to make bad decisions given a set of complex options that they don't understand, it seems like they made a rational choice. AppStores on the various phone platforms have a similar decision to make as to how to best protect users from apps, and there isn't consensus as to the best model in that arena either.
They do need to step up their activity to remove malicious apps in light of giving regular applications this option.