Wednesday, January 19, 2011

19/01 Facebook temporarily shut information-sharing apps


English.news.cn   2011-01-19 09:28:20FeedbackPrintRSS
BEIJING, Jan. 19 (Xinhuanet) -- Facebook's controversial move to give apps the ability to capture users' mobile phone number and address is temporarily suspended.
When downloading a Facebook app, people have always been asked if they want to share their name, picture, friends list, and other information.
The social network pushed through the new change last Friday by throwing in an additional request asking to share a person's address and mobile phone number.
This new change has triggered massive negative feedbacks from users because they cannot know what the app is really about until they've agreed to share their contact information during the app installation process.
Concerns quickly arose that malicious apps could tap into the new feature to snatch addresses and cell numbers.
"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 Facebook's Douglas Purdy in a blog post Tuesday.
"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."
(Agencies)
Editor: Fang Yang
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