Dan Rose, Facebook’s head of platform marketing said the company was happy with the security tools it had place to prevent ‘rogue apps’ from spamming users across Facebook.
Responding to a question at UK press conference at Facebook’s European headquarters, about whether the social network would consider introducing vetting measures similar to Apple’s App Store, which forces third party developers to jump through several security loops before admitting their app to the shop, Rose replied: “The tools we have in place which stop apps from spamming users have become more sophisticated…the actions we have taken have reduced the level of spam across Facebook.”
However according to Sophos, an internet security firm, Facebook is plagued by rogue applications which solely exist to post spam links to users' walls, point users to survey scams that earn them commission - and sometimes even trick users into handing over their mobile numbers to sign them up for a premium rate service.
The issue of security and users’ privacy came back into the spotlight last week. After Facebook was forced to disable a new feature which allowed third party app companies access to people’s personal contact details, after negative feedback from security experts and users.
Rose, when questioned why the company had temporarily disabled the new feature, which allowed third party app developers access to people’s mobile phone number and home address (if already part of a person’s profile), once a user had agreed to downloading an app, admitted that the firm had made a “mistake”.
“We did make a mistake. Companies make mistakes and this was a mistake. But we quickly looked at user feedback and responded to it within 24 hours,” he said.
Rose said that the company had failed to make the notification of what additional data users would be giving away to third party app developers prominent enough, and was working on displaying the actual data in a box at the point when users agree to an app’s terms and conditions, before turning the feature back on.
When asked why Facebook wanted to allow third party companies access to this data in the first place Rose said: “The data belongs to our users and they should be allowed to easily take their data with them.” He gave examples of how certain app companies would benefit from having a user’s personal contact details, such as an airline app
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