The Facebook application from hell

Well, I guess it's time even for me to do some complaining...

But it's not Facebook in itself I have complaints about - it's an application.

On Facebook there are a number of applications developed by companies or private persons. These applications which can be added to your profile are not developed by Facebook, but Facebook offers you the service of using them. They've also (in their much debated terms of use) made a disclaimer saying they do only accept responsibility for the content of the applications developed by themselves and they are therefore not responsible for the content of these other applications.

Some applications seems mainly to be a way to distribute spam, others are mainly for fun. There are also applications designed to make it easier for the users for example to find their "friends".

Yesterday morning I became aware of an application called "Who's Online" which was developed by a company called "Applehat studios".

The purpose of this application is to display - on your profile - which of your friends are online at the moment and which of these have been recently active. It does this by displaying the presentation picture of those friends. The recently active ones show up in full colour, whereas those who haven't been recently active are faded out.

This sound quite good - doesn't it?

Well... The only trouble is that in your Facebook profile's privacy settings you can decide whether you wish to display to others whether you're online or not. If you choose to not appear as being online you won't appear as this when people view your profile and you won't appear as being online when people use Facebook's own function in the "Friends" roll down menu where you can view your friends for example by who's been online in the past five minutes or who's recently updated their profile, a s o...

Now, this "Who's Online" application overrides this! In reality this means that even if you've changed your privacy settings so as not appear to be online you still appear as being online on the sites of your friends who've added this application.

Seeing as how many people have broadband connections that in effect means they're online 24-7 lot's of people have chosen to change their settings so as to not appear as being online. But, as I've pointed out, this application overrides that!

If any of your friends have added this application the developers seems to believe they have the right to access your information. You don't even have to add the application yourself - it's enough that one of your friends add it! This means that you can (since you haven't given your permission to them to access your information) completely oblivious to the fact, be sharing information that you've made a conscious decision not to share.

Yes, I am aware that every time I go online a whole bunch of information is gathered about me.
Yes, I'm also aware that in most cases I haven't given my permission to this (not expressively anyway).

BUT!

Seeing as how this application overrides your privacy settings and seeing as how there are potentially millions of Facebook users who can have their privacy violated and not even be aware of it, I've decided to bring this up anyway.

On the discussion board for this application I started a thread about this privacy intrusion yesterday morning, hoping to get a response from one of the developers. The response I was hoping to get was that they would fix this. But no response came. What did come was responses from other Facebook users who agreed that this was unacceptable and should be fixed. Several users have now chosen to report this application as violating their privacy, so hopefully this will be continued...

For now the only thing that seems to work is to go to the applications site and block it. That will stop you from appearing on your friends' sites since you're blocking the application from accessing your information.

I would therefore like to ask that anyone who finds this manner of intruding on people's privacy appalling (yes, Facebook users are people, too) to spread the word about what this application does.

I would also like to ask all Facebook users who find this appalling to block the application and report it to Facebook.

There is power in numbers! If enough people react perhaps we can make something happen.

P.S.
If you're curious about the company who developed this application you can visit http://applehat.com/

I did...

P.P.S
I would be very surprised if this was the only application that violates the Facebook users' privacy. So before you add a new application - find out what it does and how it works! As they say: better to be safe than sorry.

Happy surfing!