Facebook Disables Phone and Address Sharing

After Facebook’s decision to allow app developers to access a user’s address and mobile phone, a number ruffled a lot of feathers over the weekend. Hence they decided to halt it for a while.
Last Tuesday, All We Like reported about Facebook allowing apps to access user info like mobile number and address. But yesterday, the social networking site temporarily disabled apps to do just that. Facebook halts this feature until changes to allow users to opt-out is implemented. As Facebook’s Douglas Purdy posted on his blog:
“On Friday, we expanded the information you are able to share with external websites and applications to include your address and mobile number (…) 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. We agree, and we are making changes to help ensure you only share this information when you intend to do so. We’ll be working to launch these updates as soon as possible, and will be temporarily disabling this feature until those changes are ready.”
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Last Friday at 6:00 PM, Facebook rolled out new permissions that give applications access to individuals’ addresses and phone numbers. And it seems like there is no way to opt-out.
Last Friday, Facebook rolled out new permissions that enable applications to access a user’s phone number and address. So if you are using any Facebook apps, its access to your profile information gets more personal than ever before. And as you can see, there’s no way to opt-out. For instance, you want to play FarmVille, you have to grant Zynga a permission to access your phone number and address. Otherwise, there’s no farming for you.
This can be a dilemma for all users since this new feature goes for all Facebook applications, including those that are malicious and opportunistic. App developers from this line can just grab as much data as they want, and sell them to third parties. With people trained to click-through this permission window, and with the new feature looks like nothing new, a question is raised: Is Facebook capitalizing in “everyone’s doing it ” mentality? The real answer is: When have they not?
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