Facebook Apps Grab Your Home Address and Phone Number

Feel like dishing out exactly where you live and your phone number to all and sundry?

Just click accept to any 3rd party app that takes your fancy on Facebook!

Farcebook has announced that it will make “a user’s address and mobile phone number accessible as part of the User Graph object.”

Basically third-party applications (Farmville et al) can now grab a fistful of your contact information.

But that’s ok “Because this is sensitive information…permissions must be explicitly granted to your application by the user via our standard permission dialogs.”

If you’re the kinda person that just clicks ‘accept’ and ‘ok’ to everything then you’ll be allowing apps to get at your address and phone number. Why doesn’t the contact information permissions have a separate, clearly-labeled dialog box? Why should it be available automatically at all?

I still can’t see why they’d want it and why anyone would say “yes have as much info about me as you want”.

I’m thinking of joining the idea of changing my phone number on Facebook to 650-543-4800 which just so happens to be Facebook customer service 😉