Facebook amends the rules for access to additional personal information of Facebook users. Postal addresses and mobile phone numbers.

Last week Facebook announced that users personal information will be made available to Facebook third party application developers. Postal addresses and mobile phone numbers will now be requested after updating the Social Graph API. To access such personal information considered as sensitive, the users will have to explicitly agree that they allow access, with a dialogue box to appear asking if they agree when they try and install an application. Facebook states that friend’s addresses and phone numbers are not provided if a user gives permission to the sharing of their information. Not surprisingly, this new information had raised eyebrows with most of its users.

Even if this has been raised as an issue due to Social Graph, a simple "phone number" search on Facebook demonstrates that there are many users who publically share their telephone numbers which clearly indicated people are not very well informed about the security issues.

Faced with overwhelmingly negative feedback on the “social graph” amendment, Facebook backpedaled, its plan. It still sees value in providing developers with access to addresses and phone numbers, which after all are useful for shipping goods ordered online. But the company plans to revise its request process to make sure that even the most click-happy user understands what he or she is agreeing to when presented with a request for address and phone data.

Facebook’s director of developer relations Douglas Purdy in a blog post wrote:

 Improvements to Permissions for Address and Mobile Number

On Friday, we expanded the information you are able to share with external websites and applications to include your address and mobile number. With this change, you could, for example, easily share your address and mobile phone with a shopping site to streamline the checkout process, or sign up for up-to-the-minute alerts on special deals directly to your mobile phone.

As with the other information you share through our permissions process, you need to explicitly choose to share this data before any application or website can access it, and you can not share your friends’ address or mobile number with applications. Also, like other data you make available to third party apps and websites, you can always clearly see and control the ways your information is being used in the Application Dashboard.

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. 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. We look forward to re-enabling this improved feature in the next few weeks.

This development clearly shows that Facebook listens to feedback….and it also shows they’re willing to roll out changes with massive privacy implications without taking into consideration the different categories of its users and with majority of them not aware enough on privacy and security elements. Before they make such amendments in the rule of game they need to spend some time educating its users on this. I hope someone is listening.

Happy reading

M