We saw early on that Facebook was willing to change policies and their API in order to protect users against clearly black hat/spammy applications, or ones that break the terms of use with users.
A new Facebook application called Break Up, created by FaceItApps, may lightly trip both of those problems. The application tells you when someone has removed you as a friend. Currently (and thankfully) there is no notice to the other person when you remove them as a friend. Sometimes they’re just a little too creepy. Antagonizing them with a friend removal notification could make them worse. So Facebook has chosen not to notify people when they are removed as a friend, and it’s one of the features I like about the service.
Break Up automatically tells you if you’ve been removed as a friend. It’s a relatively simple application. But since this information isn’t available through the Facebook API, it probably requires the use of scraping of your friends sites to see if you remain a friend (this was one of the issues Facebook had with what Plaxo was doing), or else just hammering the getFriends function in the API over and over.
There service itself is not currently violating Facebook’s terms of use, and the application is live. But they are still waiting on inclusion into the Facebook directory. In an email to the Break Up developers (which they forwarded to us), Facebook said:
We sincerely apologize for the delay, but we are currently in the process of reviewing this application to ensure that it does not violate any of the site’s Terms by allowing users to view which of their friends have removed them from the Friend List. Break Up is one of the first applications we’ve seen to include this functionality, and we appreciate your patience as we decide our policy going forth. We will inform you as soon as a conclusion has been reached.
FaceItApps was clearly looking for sympathy from us in sending it to our attention. But when it comes to user privacy, I tend to see things as a bright line. The application is in a grey area that hasn’t yet been contemplated by Facebook but is clearly something many users won’t like. The fact that they are likely scraping to get their data just puts them in a worse position.
If you are contemplating an application that is within the strict guidelines of Facebooks terms of use but is questionable when it comes to user privacy or Facebook’s server stability, don’t be surprised if Facebook puts you on hold and changes the rules. It’s in the long term best interest of the network and its users to block it, and therefore also in the best interests of Facebook employee’s stock value.
Anyone (user or develoepr) who has thoroughly read a service providers TOS (with or without the fine prints) and follow their guidelines strictly would probably won’t use the service in the first place.
Gmail, for example, was never meant to be used for some witty apps like “Gmail Drive”. But people do use it. Obvious reason being, they either never read the Gmail TOS, or are very willing to take their own risk (of total data lossage due to overnight account termination)..
The problem with not knowing who dropped you is you may keep adding the same people, which will piss them of…. Knowledge is power and what you’re basically suggesting is that facebook protects us by keeping us ignorant.
I’m calling bs on the whole argument that Facebook is protecting it’s users from black hat/spammy applications. Flixter is one of the “most successful” apps on facebook but it violates Facebook policies and I don’t see them doing anything about it; that would compromise there millions of page views for the sake of its users . I honestly do not think Facebook holds all developers to the same standards.
Friendship relations in Facebook are exclusively bidirectional, so checking the user’s own friend list (which is freely provided on each request by the app) is enough to know someone has de-friended the app user. No scraping or checking in on friends explicitly is required. There’s nothing in the app (assuming they respect the 24 hour cache requirement) that explicitly violates the technical ToS, it’s mostly a moral issue, on which grounds I agree with the sentiment of the post.
Just wanted to drop in that what this application does isn’t necessarily a violation of the Facebook TOS.
If they’re scraping (which they don’t need to) or storing (might have to) the list of friends, then it is. But the UIDs of all the friends of one person is easily available using the platform. They just need to check for a difference between two comparisons, and they’ll have the friends who were removed.
This is extremely obtrusive however, though if you add the application, you obviously want to share the information. It’s all about individual freedom.
I’m pretty sure this violates the TOS. Evidence is at http://develope....0&doc=misc
In short, Apps are permitted to store content-identifying numbers (user IDs, event IDs, et cetera), but they cannot store any relationship data about those IDs (e.g. if a user is attending an event, or–importantly–whether two users are friends). Relationships must be queried from Facebook every time they are needed by an app. Since an app adhering to those guidelines would only ever have one set of friend relations available (those that Facebook returns at that moment), they shouldn’t be able to figure out what has changed since the last query.
That said, it may be the case that the Developer Terms of Service ( http://develope...k.com/terms.php ) technically gives users the right to grant permission to apps to export whatever data they want (see Section 1, definition of “Exportable Facebook Property”; Section 2, Subsection A, Clause 6; and Section 2, Subsection B, Clause 8.), pursuant to a “full-disclosure opt-in.” If FaceIt provided such a disclose, they might be within the legal letter of the TOS (though Facebook could easily clarify/change the TOS to disallow it).
Good as breakups are even common on the internet.
http://tekno-wo...ld.blogspot.com
“Currently (and thankfully) there is no notice to the other person when you remove them as a friend.”
what are you a coward? IF you cant be honest and say to some one you dont want to be their friend/acquintance anymore, then maybe you need your head examined. It is more creepier to have these people still think you are friends with them. Hey but with 2997 friends, its no wonder people have problems like that.
uhh, you can deduce this information by diff’ing the results from 2 getFriends calls, so this information is certainly available
I need to add at least 3 friends to my list everyday or I can’t go to bed!
Nice feature! so you guys out there, careful not to hurt your friends or else…
nhick
http://www.itrush.com
I can’t see how they could be doing this without storing the ids of all your friends, then getting the list again to see who’s missing. Storing the ids definitely violates the TOS.
Amazing. You cannot see on FB who removed you? On LJ this was for years a standard feature. Cannot see why someone would deny me a right to know my status.
My team wrote the application (http://apps.fac...k.com/break_up/)
We don’t violate the TOS, as far as I can tell. Given that FB has been reviewing it for almost a month, they must not think so either, as the app is currently written.
We do not scrape, which I believe would violate the TOS (We read TC enough to know that we would not get away with that!). We just look at the information that is available in the API to everyone and use it according to the TOS to provide information that a lot of fans want to know (good guess damon)
A note on privacy: there are actually two modes. In private mode, only you see the results of a friend break up. In public, everyone does. Believe it or not, given the general bias of developers, we default to private. So, if you are just curious whether one of your 500 friends has “left the fold”, you can find out. If you had three friends, it would be obviously, right? If you sat and copied all your 500 friends every day on to a note pad, you could figure it out, right? We’re just giving you a heads up.
What we object to and worry about is ipso facto changes to broad business rules at Facebook. I’m not talking about the kind of fine tuning to numbers of invites, etc., which applies to everyone. We’re worried about evaluation of apps and accepting and rejecting them based on their utility (or perhaps because they compete with Facebook’s own features). We don’t think that would be good long term for Facebook, because is discourages development. We really want to see Facebook succeed, because we love Facebook and the Facebook Platform!
Jason
(www.faceitapps.com)
The break_up app nicely brings today’s “socially obligated friendship” to its sense.
Keep this app off facebook. I agree with you Michael. You don’t want the creeps getting notice
Yuri and Sebastian – you are exactly the kind of friends that people would want to remove without you knowing, and getting pissed/creepy about it.
But Mike, the information is already there.
We’re just reporting on it.
We’re not doing anything nefarious to point it out, are we?
Expecting that people do not realize that someone has unfriended them is not a reasonable expectation of privacy on Facebook. Two people were friends … one of them unfriends…if the other takes the time to scan their own list every day, they will notice the lack of the former friend.
Hoping that someone will not notice an unfriend is like Yahoo! canceling another application/service and hoping you won’t notice and put it in the deadpool!
To put in bluntly – Apps are the worst thing that ever happened to Facebook.
The ones that spam all your friends when you install them are the worst. Particularly the ones that aren’t up front about what they are doing. Like when you get a message that “so and so” sent you a message – then you click to view it and it takes you to the app install page. It should never be allowed.
fair enough. Although I think you are jumping the gun with your conclusions about me and my friends. I guess it depends how you define friendship, for some the term is more exclusive than for other people. Those who use a more selective approach towards who they call friends, are not likely to come in the predicament in the first place. Offcourse I speak for myself, I am glad you speak for everyone else and that your opinion equals that of the people.
Sebastian: You’re getting even creepier, my man.
Love it….You know it was just a matter of days before this one hit the books.
I wish there was some way that it would be “cool” to unfriend people that you’re not really friends with. Right now it’s a big slam, and that’s annoying. FB’s big angle is to make their friends graph accurately represent the real world social network, and it doesn’t do that. Any ideas on how it could become cool to unfriend the people you’re not actually friends with? Also, I’d love to be able to block my annoying friends who use status as advertising. I hate that.
After adding this application, it says it will not be activated without inviting 20 of your friends to use it. I’m not sure if this is true or just a ruse to get gullable people to invite their friends to use the application, but it sure seems shady… I think I may have to block this application.
The application no longer requires that users invite friends. It used to do this, like MANY recent apps. The reason that some apps require you invite friends to use them is that applications that are valuable (like Break Up), but rarely used (monthly?) utilities, are very hard to grow virally. This is in large part because of recent limits imposed by Facebook to limit spam. Limiting spammy apps is a good thing, but the impositions hurt most apps that are not ultra light touch (e.g., Send MOJO, Send Hotness). Facebook applications did this feature of requiring you invite friends, because in the marketplace of competing apps, the ones that did this won out.
We heard from users that they did not like this requirement, so we removed it. Just click skip and you are done. You won’t be asked again, though it would be nice (if you like it) if you invited people.
Then remove this from the heading when you first install the application: “You must invite at least 20 friends to activate this application.” It is misleading.
What a shame that Facebook don’t seem to care about privacy. At least http://www.b4uparty.com has always displayed honest, consciencious policies.
What’s creepy about Sebastian? I understand his point of view, and I dont find it creepy.
Chris Neumann is on to something. Maybe you could put “removed” friends in a certain list (”Distant friends”, or something like that?), and remove them from the main Friends list.
Perhaps the new groups and the up-coming per-user privacy settings can be used to restrict what some friends see on your profile..
There use to be a click point that would let me see less of a Friend, Now I have to hide them completely or delete them as friends. Could we have something like the last note…..Distant Friends or something…..I don’t mind seeing my friends on FB, but some times they fill the pages with Junk and I cannot delete any of it. Just Hide. On the Home page there needs to be a way to delete another persons junk…..thanks