| Between 2007 and 2009 it was a far west for Facebook apps.
A gift app that you could write with about 100 line of code could reach 10 millions of users in 2 days. More complex apps could do better. That was the most amazing part. At that time the Facebook's API was pretty much open and you can get everything. It was an experiment and Mark Zuckerberg had a lot of hope in what people could do with that data to add value to the users. I was not doubting that he was doing it with good intentions. But he was naive... Unfortunately, most of the apps were abusing all the channels that Facebook was giving them to get more users and milk money out with ads and micro-payments (ex: through OfferPal Media - now Tapjoy). During that time I was pretty surprised how much info people were giving away with a click through. Even on the main Facebook product people were posting all kind of stuff, including stupid things they were doing. It really seemed that people were becoming more open and it was the beginning of a new era for privacy (or lack thereof). Facebook realized pretty quickly what apps were doing and they started adding more granular permissions.
Eventually Facebook started limiting more and more access to the API until 2011/2012 when the user generating gold mine was pretty much gone. Again, Facebook has always been working to fix the experience for their users and also to make clear that those where 3rd party apps. But people did not really care. There have been probably hundred of thousands of apps that had access to "sensitive" user data. According to the Facebook's Term of Service, data could not be stored for more than a certain amount of time. But nothing was technically preventing people to store that data forever... And here we are... |