Facebook: If You Build It, They Will Come and Screw It Up

« What Was I Saying About Charter and NebuAd? | Main | When Journalists Attack »

June 27, 2008

Facebook: If You Build It, They Will Come and Screw It Up

Facebook places an awful lot of trust in third party app developers:

“Until Facebook suspended the Top Friends app, created by Slide, anyone could browse partial profiles of anyone else on Facebook who had added Top Friends to their page. CNET News.com confirmed that the security hole exposed the birthdays, gender, and relationship status of strangers, including Facebook executives, the wife of Google co-founder Larry Page, and one profile that seemed to belong to Paris Hilton that used her middle name ‘Whitney.’

“Basically, the app was not obeying the privacy settings specified by the user, enabling anyone with the know-how to bypass the security once they obtained someone’s Facebook ID number.

“‘We expect third-party apps to follow the rules the users set,’ Ben Ling, director of platform product management at Facebook, said in a phone interview Wednesday. ‘With Top Friends, the privacy settings of the user were not being respected according to the privacy policy terms of use.’”

Well, if we’re going to talk about expectations as an expression of what we most fondly wish, I guess I expect a platform that takes steps to keep this sort of thing from happening at the API level, not at the “we told the darned developer, what else can we do?” level.

If we want to talk about expectations as an expression of what we think we’re going to get regardless of our fondest wishes, I don’t know whether Ling or I should be wearing the dunce cap. Because I pretty much expect this sort of thing is going to be the norm until the Conjoiners take over and we no longer need Facebook since we’ll be able to SuperPoke each other with brain waves. That doesn’t make me a dunce. What makes me a dunce is that I fully expect that sort of thing and I’m still using Facebook.

(Link)