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Facebook Re-Design FAIL

July 26, 2008 in "Expose" by Kyle Brady [Shortened URL]
Tags: Facebook, Failure, Privacy, Security

If you haven’t heard or noticed by now, Facebook is in the process (or is finished?) rolling out a redesign of … pretty much everything. Check out www.new.facebook.com to activate it. But I’m not here to analyze it like everyone else, even though I think it’s a pretty cool update.

I’m here because they screwed up.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the “applications” page, because I had a feeling that something was going to happen… and it did.

Click, because it’s relevant.

See all the things I’ve circled in red? Most of those are applications I’ve never added. Ever. And in the case of “Bumper Sticker”, “friendbinder”, and “Top Friends”… those are ones that were added and removed (before the design change) within a 24 hour period.

My first question is: what the hell?

Is Facebook just randomly letting applications access my data, and decide that I’m now a “user” of them? Because, if so, that’s not only stupid and wasting my time… but it’s also a huge privacy concern.

My second question is: what the hell?

I’ve tried to remove ALL of the ones that I circled in the screenshot… they won’t go away. They disappear from my profile, and from some of the settings pages… but remain on others. Which would lead me to believe they’re not really gone, they’re just pretending to be.

My third question is: what the hell?

There have long been rumors that Facebook doesn’t actually delete any data, they just “delete” it. Instead of removal, a field is changed to tell the rendering engine “Hey! Don’t show this!” – which might make sense in some cases, but not as an overall policy.

This is solid proof that they do exactly what people have been whispering about… besides the whole “delete my account” controversy, of course.

My fourth question is: what the hell?

I’m actually out of “Items for Hell” at this point.

Your Mission

This needs to be fixed immediately. Check your applications page, see if you’ve got anything weird going on. Send them feedback (using the “send feedback” button… obviously), regardless of whether or not you have this problem… they need to know that many people care about this, and it’s kind of a big deal.

p.s. Yes, I’m still using Vista on this computer. But that’s because I haven’t gotten Ubuntu running yet… the RAID-1 array and the supersexy, but “too new”, combo optical drive are creating major problems.

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Update (7/28/2008 2:30pm PST): SitePoint blogger Josh Catone (formerly of RW/W) picked this up, and wrote his own take on it.

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If you look at your picture, all of the apps you circled state that no feed stories should be published. So my theory is that Facebook remembers that you've blocked feed from that app, even if you've removed the app, so if you add the app again, you still won't have feed for that app.