Hey Gertjan, You’re right, not a lot of info on the subject of App’s Others Use. I first wrote about it here on Medium: on March 19th
Then CNET on March 22nd, Laura Hautala wrote a similar story about Apps Others Use too.
On March 27th Author Brian Barrett of Wired Magazine said the Apps Other Use setting didn’t do much in his story titled The Facebook Privacy Setting That Doesn’t Do Anything.
It’s not, though, how Facebook has worked since 2014, when it shut off that spigot. Developers haven’t been able to raid someone’s friend list in years — unless both friends have downloaded the same app — despite what that particular setting would have you believe. After the publication of this article, Facebook did identify one edge case in which the setting would apply: If you have the “Posts on my timeline” option checked, an app could access a photo or video that a friend uploaded, but only if it appeared on your timeline, because you also allowed tagged photos of yourself to show up there.
Note I emphasized the unless both friends have downloaded the same app- That’s a pretty HUGE hole of shared information.
How many times are we offered the chance to quickly log in to any number of sites like Medium or Spotify or Bing or Airbnb, or Dropbox or Venmo or thousands of other sites using our Facebook credentials? Seems like the chances of two people downloading the same App are pretty good when it come to the ubiquitous apps like Instagram(before the Facebook purchase) or Messenger. Also, the “edge case” Barett references of Posts on my timeline allowing other apps(that a friend may not have downloaded) to see video or photos from my posts on a friends timeline, doesn’t seem so out on the edge to me. I wouldn’t be too happy if any app automatically got access to photos and videos I posted to a friend on a closed Facebook group or even on a friends page. Think about it, even if I toggled that it was for “friends of friends” to view some weird app might be looking at it or doing who knows what with it.
Also, CNET followed up with a story by Alina Bradford on April 10th that talked about the Apps Permissions issue.
The topic and cautions about How To See What Facebook Knows about You and How to Control the Permissions you give apps were in my Facebook Privacy Settings blog on techwellness.com for a year before the Cambridge story broke, which is why I made the video the day the story came out in the US--it just made sense that some of us were unknowingly sharing more than we thought we were and that was a factor in the data being multiplied.
As far as your question about IF friend data can still be shared: I’ll update this story in the next couple of days with 2 screenshots from Facebook’s current privacy setting and Facebook’s “help” pages. They indicate that the one of the reason Apps may want your information is so that they can help find friends that also use the App so you can play a game with them. So, at the very least, the App that is accessed via Facebook is taking information and using the data to identify other users of the App.
Thank you so much for your comment.
