I’ve avoided angry rants on this blog till now, but I have to rant about this:
Today Facebook made a change to how Applications interact with your wall. In an attempt to compete with Twitter they gave enabled wall-posting permissions for most applications, notably Twitter and Friendfeed.
The permissions added by Facebook appear to override the settings that end-users have added themselves. For instance, if you have these applications and they are set to “never publish”… guess what? They’re publishing.
I found out about this when I was informed by friends that I was “spamming” Facebook. Initially I didn’t understand—I thought it was merely a remark about how much I use Twitter. It turns out however that Facebook had been publishing both from Twitter and from FriendFeed (duplicating the Tweets) directly to my wall.
I’ve tried to change my settings back to “never publish” and it turns out my settings haven’t changed at all—I simply don’t have the ability to override the changes made by Facebook. All I’ve been able to do to stem the tide of spam is to delete the Applications entirely.
Facebook, I am appalled. When I set an Application to “never publish”, I expect that it NEVER PUBLISHES TO MY WALL. This undermines my trust in your so-called “privacy” settings.
UPDATE: 12.40PM: TechCrunch are speculating that this is a bug with the Twitter App and that Facebook have fixed it. But is it really? And how was it getting information from those who didn’t have Twitter applications installed? Or from FriendFeed for that matter? Fishy!!
UPDATE: 1:18PM: Mashable are also on the story now, reporting both the Twitter and FriendFeed apps on the fritz.
UPDATE: 8:16PM: Facebook have advised that a “small bug” caused the problem.
Earlier this evening, a small Facebook bug allowed a handful of apps to publish to the stream on behalf of users who had previously authorized the app. The situation has now been resolved, and all application settings will remain intact for users.
