Facebook stops third-party apps from stealing users' data

IANS  |  San Francisco 

has finally begun its crackdown on third-party apps from stealing, sharing or your data without permission from its platform as well as from

According to Facebook, the publish_actions permission will be deprecated. This permission granted apps access to publish posts to as the logged in user.

"Apps created before today that have been previously approved to request publish_actions can continue to do so until August 1. No further apps will be approved to use publish_actions via app review," the post noted.

British political consultancy firm was found misusing users' data collected by a quiz app which used the "Login with Facebook" feature.

"Developers currently utilising publish_actions are encouraged to switch to Facebook's Share dialogs for web, iOS and Android," said.

"Effective today, name and bio from comments on your own media will be removed; you will continue to receive username and comment text.

"On August 1, the Live application programming interface (API) Apublish_actions permission, which allows an app to publish on behalf of its Users, will be reserved for approved partners.

"A new permission model that allows apps to publish Videos to their User's Groups and Timeline will be created instead," said

There is also an "Graph API" change which removes the ability to pull the profile of users who leave comments on your posts.

Several third-party trackers are still abusing Login, exfiltrating users' data including name, email address, age range, gender, locale and profile photo, claimed a new security research report from Freedom to Tinker -- a digital initiative by Policy.

The researchers found two types of vulnerabilities: Seven third parties abusing websites' access to user data and one-third party using its own "application" to track users around the web.

--IANS

na/in

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

First Published: Wed, April 25 2018. 09:48 IST