So essentially I have no problem with others (who aren’t my friend) seeing my picture. I need it for profile searches as I have quite a common name so people can work out I am the right person in the search, but the problem I have is about people rating me and them storing other peoples comments on me etc without my permission or informing me.

I have found one app doing this, but I am sure there are many more – and I can’t block /opt out of them unless I know they exist (unless I block all apps), that’s the problem.

I’m not really sure that random people rating other people apps should actually be allowed on facebook in my opinion anyways, but I can see that perhaps an app where friends can rate friends who have opted in and only friends can see the comments could be quite fun and as you have opted in you would be aware of what was going on and could opt out if it stopped being fun for you.

On the comments of the app I found there was a girl who was very upset as people had been commenting on her saying she had stds and stuff and she didn’t even know she was on there – this is blatantly unacceptable.

Interesting aside: I wonder if my ‘attractiveness’ will be very different on different apps :S

I really agree that Facebook itself is doing the best they can now, but they should’ve acted earlier and, well, it’s still quite hard to trust them after the whole Beacon thing. It’s the third party applications I’m worried about.

You can also limit the amount of information that applications can grab.

It’s true that some devs are not respecting the TOS. But imho it should be user’s responsability to set the right privacy settings.

Anyway facebook is acting pretty good in this way now. They are coming over the downsides of the platform.

In your ‘privacy’ settings, in ‘other applications’ you can also turn off sharing stuff like your picture.

As I said, Facebook’s settings, when you dig deep down, are surprisingly extensive. Sure there are gaps, but I can’t say that they’re not working on it.

Yes, and I do agree, your second paragraph, it is totally party-pooping and I do not mean to be a killjoy. Unfortunately, that is the “right” way to do it. On some level I do not mind that people rank me behind me back. The problem is that there are people developing these applications in violation of Facebook’s own privacy standards.

There are even some applications which send me directly e-mail that “your friend did something or other”. I’ve not given my friend or Facebook the right to give my e-mail address to this application. In simpler terms, some Facebook applications even go as far as to spam you.

The Facebook developer forums are full of ethical people asking how they could accelerate the membership numbers of their apps without resorting to these spammy and shady practices. Unfortunately, as long as the situation is this, they can’t.

If the latter were not the case, the situation would probably be as follows: Your friend installs an application which rates his friends. A notification is sent out to you whether you want to be rated, you can accept of deny, and I assume you will deny to be listed on hottest vampires of the 21st century? While this is probably much more privacy-respecting, I would also call it totally… party-pooping.

The only sure way to not have anyone use your data is to only upload data you want to share—with the knowledge that anything you share can and will be used against you—and to be very strict in your privacy-settings—which, apart from the 3rd party app situation you outlined, are surprisingly broad.

Incidentally, if you think about it, your argument is the same one employed by the media-industry against piracy.