Is access to the Personal Information by Facebook Application Developers a Serious Concern?

It is a duty of any Facebook Application developers to perform within the framework of company’s policy. They could retain the personal user information within the specified period extending not more than one full day.

Developers have been scratching their heads against this policy because if an app is capable to recollect personal data of the user forever, it could start instantly thus saving the time it would generally have taken to ping the same towards the server. Now they no longer had to get irritated on this regard, as the time restrictions have been removed. This news was announced during F8 conference but now there is a need to see if this new change is good for the developers or their biggest drawback?

Facebook applications constantly have an access to your user profile, and are aware of all your personal information like to which place are you from, groups you have signed for and even about your interests mentioned on Facebook. However, now the decision of Facebook to permit Facebook developers to design permanent retention of personal information into their apps will only have an impact on the length of the period information can be stored without any other changes however.

Most of the app makers have been ignoring Facebook’s policy pertaining to the time period and only adopting what appeals them the best and Facebook also has never checked. This has been increasing the vulnerability of the users towards the theft of the personal information.

Facebook has half a billion users and many of the apps for instance have around 100 million of them, and any top developer should have capacity to deal with the security issue, but then what about the developer’s concern. The answer to this perplex situation is the time restriction for the developers to hold personal information and that too under certain conditions.

Facebook Developers can have access to subscription list to give app users most personalized experience

Facebook has allowed its developers to seek permission for having lists of subscribers and who they subscribe through Graph API. With read permission for subscriptions, Facebook developers can easily have more personalized experience for their users as they have accessibility to track subscriptions over time.
As it is not possible for Facebook to provide analytics for the users, people can very well move to apps to trace their growth rate. Facebook does not make any improvements too for its search function on its developers’ site. These search results now also include technical Q&A and bugs from Stack Overflow. It also entails the developers to filter results by their type.

Further permission is also required for managing ‘notifications to read’ or ‘manage users’ notifications’. The announcement of this change was made in July 2011 and migration has been completed as per the announcement by Facebook. Also there is every possibility that the social network will depreciate the old page insights. It is also being announced that the old insights will be totally removed by 15th Feb.
To have an access to the information for subscriber’s information, app should be equipped with the users _subscriptions and friends subscriptions for the friends info. To read more details about the subscribers list, it is highly recommended to go through the documentation for ‘Subscribed To’ and ‘Subscribers’ for more details.

To go through the user’s subscribers like, issue an HTTP GET request for subscribers connection like

https://graph.facebook.com/USER_ID/subscribers?access_token=...

In the same way for having access for subscribers list, there will be an HTTP GET request for subscribing for connectivity, which will be

https://graph.facebook.com/USER_ID/subscribedto?access_token=....

To get updated on any changes on Facebook, it is highly recommended to visit Facebook developers.