— Facebook is temporarily holding off on letting developers request its
users’ addresses and phone numbers after a bit of frustration from its
users and security experts.
But the move to grant access to such information to
external websites and applications isn’t going away altogether,
Facebook said in a post on its Developer Blog on Tuesday morning.
For now, the ability for third-party Facebook app
developers and websites to request a user’s address and phone number
has been disabled, but it will come back, the company said.
Facebook first announced the move to grant such access Friday night.
“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,” wrote
spokesman. “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. We look forward to re-enabling this improved feature
in the next few weeks.”
who writes for its Naked Security blog, described the decision on
Facebook’s part to enable the sharing of such information as a “move
that could herald a new level of danger for Facebook users.”
Cluley and others warned that the ability to access
users’ home addresses and phone numbers would create increased risk for
identity theft, particularly when combined with the other data already
available to be extracted from Facebook profiles.
“I realize 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 wrote.
“Facebook is already plagued by rogue applications
that post spam links to users’ walls, and point users to survey scams
that earn them commission — and even sometimes trick users into handing
over their cell phone numbers to sign them up for a premium rate
service.”
One bit of advice Cluley offered was to simply not
list any address or phone number on a Facebook profile, much less any
other information that a user wouldn’t want shared with the public.
Facebook declined on Monday to give any reason as to
why applications and websites would want or need a user’s address or
phone number, but explained a bit of its rationale in Purdy’s post
Tuesday.
“With this change, you could, for example, easily
share your address and mobile phone with a shopping site to streamline
the checkout process, or sign up for up-to-the-minute alerts on special
deals directly to your mobile phone,” Purdy said.
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