Excellent, thanks a lot for sharing, I'm sure we all have same problem with new facebook app authentication protocols.
I was annoyed with sites asking for too many Facebook privileges and made this
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Re: I was annoyed with sites asking for too many Facebook privileges and made this
#92I just disabled the entire API. I see no difference in "user experience" save not being able to trade eggs.
Re: I was annoyed with sites asking for too many Facebook privileges and made this
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apps usually request that stuff for some reason, and the vast majority of users don't have enough understanding of the systems to know which permissions are safe to revoke. Breaking the app is the point of doing this. It's often not clear that, say, a FB app will post, as the user, to their own stream. I think most people don't want this, and want the app to break if it tries. You're thinking of "safety" from the per…
You're absolutely right - the point is to break the app. This is great if the user breaks the apps in exactly the ways they want, but my point is that users rarely understand the scope of the app, and may (and likely will) end up revoking permissions that break functionality they want. For example. I sign up with Foobar's Widgets with my Facebook account, and manually deny the "publish_stream" permission, because I j…
>I, the user, go to Facebook, expecting to see the widget there, but it's not there. I'll just assume it's lag. Things are slow sometimes. But it never shows up. I'm left with the assumption that it's Foobar's fault, for having a buggy "Share to Facebook" button.
If the button doesn't give you error feedback when you click it then it is buggy. The author has to assume anything an everything will give an error at some point, and reporting errors to users is important. Saying "everything is great!" and then erroring silently in the background is lazy and deserving of a user's ire.
Re: I was annoyed with sites asking for too many Facebook privileges and made this
#94This is awesome. Good work.
Re: I was annoyed with sites asking for too many Facebook privileges and made this
#95Re: I was annoyed with sites asking for too many Facebook privileges and made this
#96You are my hero, sir.
Re: I was annoyed with sites asking for too many Facebook privileges and made this
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I signed up for airbnb using my facebook account and I noticed that they give away your DOB. I immediately changed my DOB on facebook and vowed to avoid authenticating with apps. I generally avoid putting in real information on facebook but the amount of stuff they give away is frightening. It's a heaven for social engineering and spear phishing.
"I immediately changed my DOB on facebook" Hmmm, I wonder what Facebook does when someone changes something like their DOB? Or name/address/email/phone? Or any other marketing-useful data in your profile? If _I_ were part of the Facebook Evil-Data-Mining Division, I'd certainly be looking to see if I can discern patterns like "This phillmv guy's _real_ birthday is 12/03/1975, but when he changes it for sites he doesn…
Facebook also limits the number of times you can change your DOB, though I'm not sure what that limit is.
Re: I was annoyed with sites asking for too many Facebook privileges and made this
#98I hate the security model where all the permissions are requested up front, and you have to approve them all (e.g. Android and Facebook without this plugin). All permissions should be off by default, and the user should be asked the first time a permission is needed to perform an action (a'la GPS on iphone) - at least that way you know what it wants the permission for, and the app can gracefully handle rejection.
Like EULAs, everyone just hits agree and move on. No one reads them. Apple did it right in iOS: ask for permission when you actually need it.
I've got a 67-page iTunes EULA I've had to agree to about 20 times that says differently. This is, unfortunately, an almost universal failing.
Re: I was annoyed with sites asking for too many Facebook privileges and made this
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
This could be like early Windows firewalls all over again; popping up windows every time you try to do something, until you just disable it.
I think the idea would to be ask once when you the app tries to do something that requires a permission, and from then on the app would be granted that permission (unless you revoke it). In practice, this doesn't seem to be a nuisance on iOS.
That's because an iOS app can access a LOT more by default than an Android app. Most data access doesn't require permission at all.
The only things apps have to ask about on iOS (that I've seen) are push notifications and GPS tracking. Android requires a permission for Internet access, and another for accessing contacts, and another for sending SMS messages, and over a hundred others.
I WOULD love to have the option (on Android) of querying a user for a permission after install; the "read system log" permission, for instance, is useful for the 0.1% of cases where there's a crash, but I have to request it for everyone if I want to get complete crash reports (the Google crash reports are useless since I use NDK and the Java stack trace, which is all it sends, doesn't tell me anything).
But honestly, with the fine-grained security model on Android, it would be a pain if every complex app had a half dozen permission requests -- and some would have a dozen or more. Frankly that would be what people would complain about if it were true. The iOS model only works because apps are SO open by default on iOS.
So I don't think the Android model is a design mistake, but rather a security necessity given that Google doesn't even take a cursory look at an app that's going up in the Market. Apple can at least claim that they've checked out each app to make sure it behaves well, though it seems even then that a few slip through the net and behave badly from time to time.
Re: I was annoyed with sites asking for too many Facebook privileges and made this
#100I think I did the ultimate opt out: I've never had a Facebook account, and I never will.
I wish it was that easy for me. My generation almost refuses to use email or even text messaging -- everything has to be done through Facebook.
I just wish the next big thing would pop up so we can stop worrying about what stupid privacy blunder Facebook will commit next.