Facebook Opens Up Home Addresses and Phone Numbers

An anonymous reader writes "Do you really want third-party app developers on Facebook to be able to access your mobile phone number and home address? Facebook has announced that developers of Facebook apps can now gather the personal contact information from their users. Security firm Sophos describes it as 'a move that could herald a new level of danger for Facebook users' and advises users to remove their home address and phone numbers from the network immediately."

Comments

Just you wait

[tiberiumx]

Yeah, delete all you want now. Next Facebook will open up the history for every field. Think of the cool 'dating/breakup timeline' an application could build.

Re:Another option

[fishexe]

And you trust FB to honor your choice of options?

Which is the real problem.

Facebook is no longer just a website run by a couple of college kids. It is a business - a big business - and like any business their number one priority is making as much money as possible.

Sadly, this is one big business that was probably creepier when it was just a website run by a couple of college kids, one of whom once said about people's Facebook data, 'People just submitted it. I don't know why. They "trust me". Dumb fucks.' At least now he has investors to sometimes keep him in check, a little bit, maybe.

Re:Message from Facebook

[mjwx]

I wonder if this is a tactic to see just how much bullshit people will put up with.

By my experience, the answer to that is quite a bit.

Just recently I decided to test just how much trolling it would take to get one of my "friends" to unfriendly me. He wasn't really a friend, I added him back in the heady days of 2007 when we added everyone and their dog. Lets just call him Frank, Frank's a bit childish and petty to start off with so I thought he'd be a perfect target. Better yet he just started to use his facebook page as an amateur marketing tool for some "artists" he was "managing" (meaning local performers he kind of hung around with). So Frank is also a bit of a pillock.

Frank had already blocked me because I own an Android phone and Frank didn't like posts about the latest thing I was doing with it so I had to post under Franks posts. I began with intellectual trolling, countering his arguments with logical discussion, this normally ended up with "you don't know what you're talking about" being the height of his counter arguments but nothing else. After a while I moved onto Grammar Nazism, and the responses elevated to ad-hominem.

After about a week I elevated to obvious trolling, First Post and popular memes, most of these just got deleted. After about a week he disappeared from Facebook. He still logged on but stopped posting. Finally 2 weeks later he launched one of his bad attempts to market some band, I could of kept going with conventional trolling but instead I took the nuclear option and hit him with a two girls and one cup link. 20 minutes later I received a phone call from Frank, literally in tears asking me to stop and I simply asked him why didn't he just unfriendly me. Still sobbing he said he doesn't want his friend count to go down. I was already in the process of un-friending Frank. Frank took a lot of abuse for a tiny bit of social status, I think many Facebook users would be the same.

I've got two facebook accounts, one is my real friends (now excluding Frank and most people like Frank who I couldn't give a rats clacker about) which is a very small list. The second is an account not under my real name which has everybody added including a lot of Thai and Philippino girls (I live in OZ, it's easy to pop over to the phils for some cheap, no strings attached action, they get de-friended when they start to ask for a lot of money).

BTW, I'm not that much of a sociopath, this is not a normal experiment for me and I was just curious as to how much abuse it would take. It kind of spiralled out of control towards the end.