[LINK] Facebook backdown -- for now

[Jan Whitaker]

"Facebook halts plan to share contact information with app developers
January 19, 2011 - 8:11AM

Facebook, in its latest privacy flap, has delayed a plan to share 
home addresses and mobile phone numbers of its members with outside 
developers of applications.

Facebook announced on its developer blog last week that it would 
begin granting developers access to home addresses and mobile numbers 
but the social network followed up with another post this week saying 
the move had been put on hold.

"Over the weekend, we got some useful feedback that we could make 
people more clearly aware of when they are granting access to this 
data," said Douglas Purdy, director of developer relations at Facebook.
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"We agree, and we are making changes to help ensure you only share 
this information when you intend to do so," Purdy said.

"We'll be working to launch these updates as soon as possible, and 
will be temporarily disabling this feature until those changes are 
ready," he said.

"We look forward to re-enabling this improved feature in the next few weeks."

The change announced last week would have allowed Facebook members to 
share their home address and mobile number with external websites and 
third-party developers of applications.

A Facebook user would have had to explicitly choose to share the data 
before it could be accessed by a application or website and home 
addresses and mobile numbers of friends could not be shared.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at computer security firm 
Sophos, was among those expressing concern about Facebook's initial move.

"I realise that Facebook users will only have their personal 
information accessed if they 'allow' the app to do so, but there are 
just too many attacks happening on a daily basis which trick users 
into doing precisely this," Cluley said in a blog post.

"Now, shady app developers will find it easier than ever before to 
gather even more personal information from users," he said. "You can 
imagine, for instance, that bad guys could set up a rogue app that 
collects mobile phone numbers.

"The ability to access users' home addresses will also open up more 
opportunities for identity theft, combined with the other data that 
can already be extracted from Facebook users' profiles," Cluley said.

Facebook is the world's most popular social network with nearly 600 
million users but it has been dogged by complaints about privacy protection."

http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/facebook-halts-plan-to-share-contact-information-with-app-developers-20110119-19vmm.html

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Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
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