Ahh the wonderful world of Social Network applications! What surprises me most about them is the lack of moderation by Facebook. I cautiously say this because I really don’t know what it takes to pass an application into the network. I do know there have been many with a sole purpose to exploit. Now I don’t want to sound like some major conspirator, such as: some who think computer viruses come from the anti-virus companies, but, the truth is but a wave. You can see it coming. Every day there are webs of friends caught by some virus yet unknowing where it come from.

We are simple too trusting. Lets face it, we wouldn’t be on Facebook or other social networks if we didn’t trust some level of Facebook protecting us. And then there is a complete generation who never knew anything but this form of communication. To them this fad has always been. They have not seen more than a couple shifts on the Net.

Rogue Applications

For starters you want to Control what your friends can share about you when using applications and websites from What your friends can share about you.

Again, in theory, if you deselect all items… this will stop others’ applications from accessing your information. Because you would by default allow friends access to see your profile, so does their applications they choose to Allow. Sorry to be a party pooper, but I don’t care if your nice quiz/game/farm/war can not harvest my information as payment for you to play their free game. They in turn can customize ads to suit my liking. How clever!

All apps give you a chance to Allow the application, the odds are that most users don’t read the disclosure before hitting the Allow button. Besides this disclaimer is pretty generic and pretty much the same for every app. One would hope it had specific juicy details about what it wants based on what you plan to allow. Instead it gets the full coverage of allowing whatever privileges the user has with other friends.

But there is more. For every application there are finer permissions to be set. Go through the different filters to show what apps match the various selections. I go through all of them to be sure I set all apps the way I want.

Here you decide again what relation level you allow the chosen app to have by clicking Edit Settings.

Then be sure to look at the Additional Permissions tab. Here you can decide if you want to allow this app to post activity to the News Feed stream. I choose not to for everything but Notes.