There’s been a recent outbreak of Facebook applications that spread by taking advantage of the notification system. The Gaurdian quote Mark Zuckerburg‘s interview with the BBC, and he seems to think “an open system anyone can participate in is generally better”; does he not realise that most users are prone to social engineering attacks and the mentality of “guilty until proven innocent” is no-where near enough to protect the main populace?
As for the technically minded, we get to see all of these spam messages from the rouge applications whenever one of our friends add them.
A simple solution as I see it, is not to enforce full vetting of all applications, but to simply change the notification system so that it becomes blatantly obvious when messages are not genuinely from a friend initiated action, but from some application attempting to masquerade. I do support stricter control over applications, but perhaps an interim measure would be to modify the notification display.
The notification system allows too much flexibility over the format of the messages sent out, for those interested, this is what the Error Check System and Closing Down notifications look like.
Took me a while to get on this, but yeah I agree for the most part. Though I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a vetting process as it would drastically cut down on most of the nasty occurrences pointed out here here. I mean just look at the iPhone stuff available from the app store, I don’t see their process slowing down business at all over there. Sure you have to jump through a few hoops to get accepted, but that’s a minor hindrance to someone with good intentions and a half decent app. I’m sure Facebook have the money, brains and manpower to set something like this up, as a “truly open” system will never work without some form of moderation, as you can’t guarantee a network of trust with 3rd party apps flying about all over the place.
The problems with the Apple app store would possibly apply here: There’s stories of developers being dissuaded from iPhone development because of how slow the approval process is, getting refused for weird reasons, constantly changing the secret rules and that non-disclosure agreement they enforce!
Also, I don’t think a “network of trust” is anywhere near what Facebook have or aim to achieve :p
I think those stories are the minority to be honest, and obviously when your creating an app which piggybacks another service, there’s always going to be substantial risks involved, which is something you have to factor in at the outset. I don’t think apple are in the position to be biased about these sorts of things as it enriches their business. The same would go for Facebook in my opinion.
Note: I’m beginning to dislike Facebook all together!