Yep, Facebook has waded into yet another privacy quagmire — this time, over plans to share member street addresses and phone numbers with third-party apps and Web sites. Users freaked, and now Facebook says it will suspend the feature pending "improvements" to the permissions process.
The flap began last Friday, after Facebook posted an entry on its developer blog detailing the new feature, which would allow third-party Facebook apps and Web sites to access the phone numbers and actual street addresses of users who'd entered the information into their profiles.
The idea behind the feature was to "streamine" the checkout process for online commerce by automatically filling in shipping and billing addresses before completing a purchase — not the worst idea in the world — as well as allow merchants to send out mobile alerts for, say, specials or discount offers.
But while the new sharing feature was designed as an opt-in — meaning that Facebook users had to explicitly grant their permission before apps and Web sites could see their info — many complained that the standard, single "request for permission" dialog box failed to emphasize that members were about to give third-party app developers and advertisers access to their home addresses and phone numbers.
Hundreds of angry comments on the Facebook developer blog took the company to task for potentially opening the door to SMS spam or, even worse, making it easy for unscrupulous advertisers to sell personal user information.
By early Monday, Facebook had apparently heard enough, with Douglas Purdy, Facebook's director ofdeveloper relations, announcing that the controversial new feature would be "temporarily" disabled pending changes to "make people more clearly aware of when they are granting access to this data."
Purdy didn't describe what those changes might entail, but Inside Facebook has a few good suggestions, including adding an extra step in the permissions dialog that warns users that they're "about to share yourmobile phone number and current address."
Of course, one way to ensure that Facebook app makers or advertisers never see your home address or phone number is to simply leave those fields blank in your profile.
Just click the "Edit your profile" link under your name on Facebook, select "Contact Information," and make sure the address and phone number fields are cleared out.
You can also delete your phone number from the "Mobile" tab under "Account Settings," but doing so means you won't be able to receive friend requests or status updates on your handset via SMS.
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