Apr09

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Never allow facebook apps to post on your behalf

Filed under Expressed Thoughts

Recently, I started seeing facebook posts that look like ‘spam posts’ such as ‘this person read an article’ or ‘that person watched a video’ etc.
Even if you report them as spam to facebook, you would still see them in your news feed, because facebook thinks they are legitimate.
so what is going on? Why does FB think it is not spam? how will you protect your own Privacy? Read on to find out…

Problem:

You read an article in the ‘Yahoo! app for facebook‘ or ‘The Guardian app for facebook’ etc, Or you watch a video from the ‘Dailymotion App for Facebook’.
The App ‘automatically‘ posts to all your facebook friends – that you read that article or watched that video.
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If you really think about it, it should never be happening this way. The App should not be posting to facebook on your behalf. You should be the person to decide what things are shared on your facebook wall. This is really an intrusion of your privacy.

Facebook’s take on the problem:

Anytime you allow an App to access your facebook wall, FB asks you if you want that application to

  1. Access your Personal Information
  2. Access posts in your news feed
  3. Post to your wall on your behalf

And since these Apps have your permission to post to your wall on your behalf, FB thinks these are valid posts from you.

What is the solution to this problem?

  1. Login to your facebook.
  2. Click on the down arrow in the upper right corner of any page.

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  3. Select Privacy Settings
  4. Scroll down to Apps and Websites and click Edit Settings
  5. Find that annoying App and click on ‘Edit’
  6. You would see something like this.

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  7. From here, either you can completely ‘remove the app’ from accessing your facebook account, or you can disallow the app from ‘posting on your behalf’

Please revisit all your apps and make sure they can not post on their own. Also, whenever you are approving any new facebook app, please make sure you give the right permissions to the app.
Hope I have helped one of my facebook friends, and in turn saved myself from seeing these annoying posts on my facebook news feed.

Additional Reading:

  1. How to control Facebook App Privacy
  2. Social Reading and Privacy

Sadish (சதீஷ்) wrote this on Apr 9th 2012 at 03:02 pm

4 Responses to “Never allow facebook apps to post on your behalf”

  1. spacer Lorenzo says:
    September 14, 2012 at 11:48 am

    I have ‘ disallowed an app from posting on my behalf ‘ several times. But i have done so before i installed each of those apps. And it has created massive problems because it wont let me access the app!! i’m unable to access the app ever again… not even to change the option.
    Is there anything i can do to change this??

    Reply
  2. spacer Galina says:
    January 3, 2013 at 5:46 pm

    Dear Sadish,
    I was delighted to find the theme Fleur de Lys for my blog and website. I understand that you were working on it sometimes ago. I use this theme for my WordPress blog and it works the treat. But for the website it’s completely different story. With a difficulties I finally managed to find a zip file of it to upload, as my website build with WordPress but hosted by Hostmonster and the Fleur de Lys was not on the list.
    But unfortunately I come across a few obstacles, like not be avle to adjust the text fonds and colours and text size of the sidebar, or making the “Meta” bit on the sidebar private. I looked up on WordPress and found something about widgets. But as you probably already understood, I am so totally and utterly amatuer and I just simply cannot rectify this myself. So I took the liberty to ask if you kindly would help me. Maybe you have a newer version of the theme which I could upload in zip file. Please, please help. Thank you in advance
    Galina

    Reply
    • spacer admin says:
      January 4, 2013 at 4:14 pm

      Galina,
      Its not possible to upload your own theme to wordpress.com account. so the best to do is, try and learn how to use widgets etc.

      Also, this theme is not updated afterwards.

      Thanks
      Sadish Bala

      Reply
      • spacer Galina says:
        January 4, 2013 at 4:30 pm

        Thank you. I will try to learn the widgets.
        Kind regards
        Galina
        PS Happy New Year!

        Reply

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    Sadish Balasubramanian - is an Indian guy in his upper 30s. He lives in Texas USA, along with his wife and two daughters.
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