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Facebook Suspends Personal Data-Sharing Feature

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the digital-foot-in-mouth dept.

Suki I writes "Facebook has 'temporarily disabled' a controversial feature that allowed developers to access the home address and mobile numbers of users. The social network suspended the feature, introduced on Friday, after only three days. The decision follows feedback from users that the sharing-of-data process wasn't clearly explained and criticism from security firms that the feature was ripe for abuse."

4 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. Well... by Lose · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Tell users they can earn stuff to use on FarmVille, and people won't care so much anymore.

  2. Meanwhile by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    3 days was enough for most of the big apps to collect most of the data from the nearly entire userbase.

  3. I wonder... by Yaa+101 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why is it so hard for people to understand that with Facebook and other so called free stuff that they are the product that is being sold.

  4. Seems to be the way of it by Boarder2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Seems like this is how Facebook continues to do it. Expose the users without telling them that they're going to do it, wait for the backlash. If there's enough, backpedal on the decision. But only after giving the parties interested in the data plenty of time to mine a ton of it, making the reversal pretty much pointless.

    Well played, Facebook. Yet another example of why you don't post anything on the Internet that you don't want known publicly.