

Starting Today, Facebook Apps Can Ask You To Hand Over Your Email Address - icey
http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/20/facebook-app-email/

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tedunangst
TC title: Starting Today, Facebook Apps Can Ask You To Hand Over Your Email
Address

HN title: Starting Today, Facebook Apps Can Require You To Hand Over Your
Email Address

There's a difference.

~~~
edw519
TC changed "Require" to "Ask" in their headline _after_ icey posted it here.
Lighten up.

~~~
tedunangst
Sorry, the post was only 5 minutes old when I said that, seemed a narrow
window to change in. My bad.

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senthil_rajasek
Here is the facebook announcement,
[http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=355](http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=355)

Applications can request you to share email addresses explicitly via their
"extended permission" api...

Its upto the user to share or not...

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westbywest
My curiosity hovers over how much freedom FB app developers have in the
"Request for Special Permissions" dialog.

Will the FB API force them to disclose the fact their app wants to email you
directly, as is shown in the screencap, or could this fact be obscured with
clever word choice or some other diversion in the dialogs?

If the latter, then this new feature sits somewhere close to sanctioned
phishing. Once an untrusted 3rd party has your email address, FB can't revoke
it. The recent stories about Farmville don't give me much reason to trust such
3rd parties.

Indeed at that point, FB, along with whatever role FB had hoped to play in
data-mining the traffic it sends to your address, become entirely irrelevant.

Which begs the question: why does FB chose to cast itself as the easily
expendable middleman?

~~~
novum
I agree with you, but your use of "begs the question" is wrong, and given that
I'm in a pedantic mood (and that this is a mistake I've seen before on HN),
I'd like to offer a word on the subject.

Begging the question is a logical fallacy in which you essentially assume your
conclusion as part of formulating your argument. Instead, you probably mean
something more like "Which brings up the question".

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question>

~~~
westbywest
Fair enough, and thx for the reference. Idiom and logic rarely get along
together.

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tarkin2
Starting from last week, I changed my facebook email address to a throw away
email address. Not as an impressive piece of foresight, however: simply to
stop companies finding my facebook details via my email address. Still, I'm
especially glad I did now.

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ajcronk
I wonder how much it costs Facebook to send all of those application
notification emails? It seems this announcement is decentralizing the sending
of those emails, and putting the onus on companies.

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benofsky
Yet another move by Facebook to show utter disrespect for their users. Sure,
we will all read the dialog before giving away our email address. However, 90%
of Facebook's users _wont_.

Proof: when they updated the privacy settings a few months ago to default to
public. Pretty much everyone in my friends list now have their profiles fully
public. Craziness.

~~~
steveklabnik
How is giving people the option to make things public disrespectful?

~~~
benofsky
Because Facebook know very well that people don't read things, they should but
they don't, and they take advantage of this. The point is it shouldn't default
to public (which it does if you've never touched your privacy settings which
previously defaulted to public).

~~~
steveklabnik
> Because Facebook know very well that people don't read things, they should
> but they don't, and they take advantage of this.

As far as I'm concerned, if you log into a website, and a modal dialog comes
up, and you don't read what it says and just click "yes"... you deserve what
you get.

I don't see anything wrong with things defaulting to public, either. Most
things you do on the internet are public, or at least associated with your
username. Such is life.

~~~
benofsky
When you signed up for Facebook though you signed up under the assumption that
your data was private.

~~~
steveklabnik
Maybe you did. Regardless of assumptions, they threw the options right up
there in front of you, and made you choose one. No excuses.

------
ohashi
Hellllloooooo Mailinator.

~~~
nollidge
Or just click "Don't Allow".

~~~
nomatteus
Or you can use Facebook's proxy option (something like
username@proxyemail.facebook.com) so app devs don't actually see your real
email address. Same sort of thing that Craigslist does.

